Hello, I am Imogen Hale and this is Dead Reckoning: Lives at Sea, maritime history told from the lower deck, where almost nobody wrote a memoir. We start in Portsmouth in February 1805, with a dock labourer called John Hart. One evening a press gang took him from a tavern, and the next morning he was on the muster book of a frigate called Phoebe, rated landsman, pay a little over a pound a month. That muster book survives. So does the ship's log, and so does one letter he sent to his sister. From those three documents we can rebuild his year almost day by day: the watches, the food, two floggings, a share of prize money, and the morning the news of Trafalgar reached a ship that had arrived too late to fight. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts.