Empire Of The Seas

One April morning in 1771,

a 12-year-old boy was rowed along the River Medway in Chatham, Kent,

to begin a new life as a midshipman in the Royal Navy.

In the waters all around him,

the great warships of the Navy lay at anchor.

Having won a long and vicious global conflict with France —

the Seven Years War — Britain was at peace,

and much of her mighty fleet was now mothballed, tied up in port.

As the boy passed the mighty HMS Victory, he would have looked up

and seen that her decks were covered and her gun ports were tightly shut.

Little can he ever have imagined their fates would one day collide.

34 years later, he would stand on the quarter deck of the Victory,

commanding the fleet in the most epic naval battle in British history ...

Trafalgar.

The boy's name was Horatio Nelson, and within his lifetime,

Britain would construct the most powerful maritime fighting force in history.

Far more than just a wooden fleet, the Navy was a national enterprise.

Its voracious demand for ships fuelled the Industrial Revolution,

while funding it drove radical financial reforms

which we still live with today.

At sea, its highly trained crews and ambitious officers

laid claim to a burgeoning empire,

and pushed back the horizons of the known world.

But there would be a huge price to pay for this global sea power.

Britain and her Navy would soon be dragged into the greatest sequence

of wars the nation had ever seen.

It would be a fight for Britain's security, her way of life,

her very identity — a colossal struggle against her old enemy, France.

And the outcome would be decided out here, at sea.

A year before the young Nelson began his career at sea,

a Royal Navy ship was sailing deep in the South Pacific ocean,

12,000 miles from home.

The skies had cleared after heavy storms, and to the west,

high cliffs emerged through the cloud.

The ship's captain decided to name this uncharted piece of land

Cape Howe, in honour of one of the Navy's finest sailors.

The captain made a precise note of Cape Howe's co-ordinates in his

private journal, and then continued north along this unknown coastline.

The date was 20th April 1770, the ship was called the Endeavour.

Her commander was James Cook.

The son of a humble Scottish labourer, Cook had worked his way up

through the Navy's ranks to become one of the service's

most respected navigators and cartographers.

His reward was command of a high profile mission ...

not to fight, but to explore.

Bring the full mast round. Come on, straight full over.

Backed by the Royal Society, the Admiralty

drew up plans for a scientific expedition to the Pacific.

It would be a journey deep into the unknown.

In 1768, Cook set off from Plymouth with a crew of 70,

including artists, astronomers and botanists.

They sailed across the Atlantic,

through the treacherous waters around Cape Horn

and then across the Pacific, to begin observations in Tahiti.

Then they turned south into uncharted seas.

Cook obsessively logged the Endeavour's speed, course and position

so that future naval crews could retrace his route precisely.

Missions like this were equipped with the latest navigational technologies.

Including a new British invention to measure latitude

which is still in use today ...

the sextant.

Every day at noon, the ship's officers would line up here on the rail of the quarterdeck

with their sextants, to measure the angle between the sun and the horizon.

Now, this helped them to fix the distance that the ship was north

or south of the equator — very sophisticated piece of kit.

Very hard to use though, particularly as the deck was always rolling around.

it was very difficult to fix the sun precisely.

The Navy also led a grand experiment with cutting-edge precision clocks,

known as chronometers.

Cook would go on to pioneer their use to measure a ship's longitude.

The Navy was mastering the sea, not through cannon fire,

but by harnessing innovative science and technology.

As they journeyed further into the unknown,

the Endeavour's civilian crew

documented more than 1,000 new animal and plant varieties

and they painted vivid pictures of local peoples and customs.

But for the Admiralty, Cook's expedition was

not simply to satisfy the Royal Society's thirst for knowledge.

While the desire to collect scientific data was real enough,

Cook also had a set of secret instructions.

They told him to take possession of convenient situations

in the name of the King of Great Britain.

Cook was going to claim undiscovered lands for the British.

This shows that the mission was as political as it was scientific.

Cook was going to extend British influence

to the very furthest corners of the globe.

In the 18th century, land was power —

a source of new markets, with new products to exploit —

and there was fierce competition for it.

The French Foreign Minister condemned Britain's Imperial project.

Britain, he said, was a restless and greedy nation.

As Cook crossed the Pacific, the French explorer

Louis de Bougainville was also circumnavigating the globe.

It was a perfect excuse to claim lands for his king.

Bougainville wanted to stop what he described as Britain's project of universal monarchy.

"We must anticipate them," he cried.

The race for global supremacy was on.

Bougainville and Cook were searching for a mythical southern continent,

another new world of riches believed to exist deep in the southern ocean.

So, when Captain Cook's look-out spotted land at Cape Howe that

April evening in 1770, the stakes couldn't have been higher.

Cook followed the coastline until his look-outs spotted

a beautiful natural harbour.

When they sailed into it, the sea was full of stingrays

and he called it Sting Ray Cove, but later,

after he'd been ashore and seen the bewildering variety of plants there,

he renamed it Botany Bay.

Little did he know it at the time, but this wasn't just some

insignificant South Pacific island. This was Australia.

Cook claimed this new land for his king.

The Navy he sailed with had grown beyond its traditional role as a fighting force.

It had become a vehicle of empire building, projecting British power,

driving commerce and conquest to the far side of the world.

Captain Cook drew up more than 40 maps and surveys

as he sailed across the South Pacific.

Today, they're held at the British Library in London.

This is a collection of sketches and charts actually made by James Cook

as he led the crew of the Endeavour

on that extraordinary voyage of discovery. This one shows

the track of the Endeavour through the South Pacific, this dotted line here.

And then it shows him arriving at the east coast of Australia here, where he

went on to chart 2,000 miles of that coastline, naming the key points and

marking out navigational hazards.

And he's written, probably quite proudly here, "Discovered in 1770".

Previous to his voyage, much of this space here just would have

been blank, but now he's sailing through it, filling in the gaps.

What I find so fascinating about the Navy in this period

is how these expeditions were unlocking the secrets of the globe.

This age of naval exploration may not have involved spectacular battles, but its

impact was every bit as significant, both for the Navy's own prestige and

Britain's international standing.

As soon as Cook got home, the British Government published these charts to prove that

his discoveries were genuine,

but it was about much more than geography, it was about politics.

Both the British Government and Cook were laying claim

to this coast of Australia, which Cook even called New South Wales,

and if you look at the other names he's choosing, they're

ostentatiously patriotic —

particularly this one, Cape St. George.

I mean, you can't get more British than that.

Australia would prove one of Britain's most valuable colonies.

English speaking, cricket playing, British in institution and law.

Yet, for the personalities and skills of the crews involved,

it could all have been very different.

One year before Cook sighted Australia,

Louis de Bougainville had reached the Great Barrier Reef.

But the French explorer was deterred by the dangerous shallow waters.

By 1771, goods from her colonies were pouring into Britain.

Dockside, merchant ships unloaded precious hardwoods from North America,

salted fish from Canada, exotic silks and spices from India.

The Empire had never been so rich or so extensive —

and it was the Navy's job to keep it that way.

This was the inheritance of young sailors like Horatio Nelson.

One of hundreds of midshipmen, trainee officers,

being toughened up to do their duty at sea.

Places, places!

Just as Nelson would have done more than 200 years ago,

these cadets, aboard the training ship, Royalist,

are being taught the dangerous and demanding arts of tall ship sailing.

What these guys are learning here is that in order to make this ship

work safely and efficiently, you've got to work as a team and you've got to obey orders.

Everything has a set procedure.

The Royal Navy was a meritocracy. The sea was an unforgiving master,

and to get promoted up through the ranks,

you had to prove that you could sail and fight.

Nelson initially showed little sign of such promise.

The captain of his first warship asked, "What had poor Horace done,

"who is so weak that he above all the rest should be sent to rough it out at sea?"

Nelson was far from alone.

Recruits as young as ten were sent to sea for months at a time, surrounded by the same faces,

confined within the same wooden walls.

It was as much a psychological test as a physical one.

The Navy's solution to this was to insist on a strict routine —

the same no matter what ship you were on, no matter where you were in the world.

The young men would have learned self-reliance and to obey orders

in order to overcome the terror and the tedium of being at sea.

I want that sheet secure.

It was often a life of hard labour, of lifting and mending sails and

rigging, carrying cannon balls and gun powder.

Yet it was also, for many young officers,

a rare chance to get an education.

The rigours of climbing aloft were interspersed with traditional school lessons,

with emphasis on the complex mathematics and trigonometry

required for navigation.

Through this regime, the Navy turned children like Nelson

from unpromising raw recruits into experienced fighting men.

Nelson himself remembered, "Thus, by degrees, I became a good pilot

"and confident of myself."

By the age of just 19, when he became a lieutenant,

Nelson had travelled over 45,000 miles around the world.

Like thousands of other young boys,

Nelson was seeing the sheer scale of Britain's global ambition at

first hand, and visiting her growing empire.

He'd been down into the southern oceans,

rounded the Cape of Good Hope and entered the Indian Ocean.

He almost died of malaria in Bombay, helping safeguard British trading

interests in the east, and he'd even fought pirates in the Caribbean.

Nelson had joined the ranks of a highly professional force —

sailors filled, as he said, "with ardent ambition".

They were a band of brothers,