Dead Reckoning: Lives at Sea

Maritime history told from the lower deck

Imogen Hale2 episodes2 min of audio58 playsEpisodic

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S1 · E2Jul 9, 20261:0137 plays Preview

The Lascars Who Sailed the East Indiamen

By 1800, Indian seamen crewed much of Britain's eastern trade and were paid a fraction of English wages. Imogen traces their recruitment in Calcutta, their voyages and their winters in London.

S1 · E1Jun 1, 20260:5921 plays Members

Pressed: One Sailor's Year on a Frigate, 1805

Using the log, muster book and a surviving letter, Imogen reconstructs twelve months in the life of a Portsmouth labourer taken by the press gang and sent to sea before Trafalgar.

About the show

Imogen Hale spent four years cataloguing sailors' letters and ships' logs at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, and she noticed that the admirals had plenty of biographies while the cooks, carpenters, boys and gunners had none. Dead Reckoning: Lives at Sea is a weekly narrated history, around forty minutes, that tells maritime history from the lower deck. The pressed sailor on a Napoleonic frigate, the lascar crews who ran the East India ships, the women who went to sea disguised or openly, the whalers of Nantucket and the Azores, the lighthouse keepers, the stokers of the Titanic, the Filipino and Indian seafarers who crew most of the world's ships today. Imogen reads the logs, the court-martial records and the letters home, and she brings in historians and working sailors where it helps. For anyone who loves the sea, anyone with a sailor in the family, and anyone who has stood on a harbour wall and wondered what it was really like out there.

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