Britain is an island, surrounded by a cold and unforgiving sea.
For centuries it protected us from attack.
But to prosper and thrive
we would need to do more than hide behind her salt-water shield.
Britain needed brave men, willing to venture out into the unknown.
And she needed good boats to take them there.
I've spent my life at sea.
Now I'm going to take passage on six boats that, together, tell the story of modern Britain.
Built for exploration, war, fishing, industry and our very survival,
these are the boats that built Britain and changed the way we live forever.
Now I'm sailing on the Matthew - the ship that discovered North America and launched Britain on a
maritime adventure, the like of which the world had never seen.
I've come to Bristol
to see this remarkable boat.
Over 500 years ago,
18 men crammed in here with explorer and map maker John Cabot
to set sail on a voyage that many of the onlookers must have thought was suicidal.
The year was 1497.
Only five years earlier, Columbus had discovered the islands of the Caribbean.
But his friend John Cabot was convinced he could find
an alternative route to the East and make a fortune of his own.
Instead, Cabot discovered North America and changed the course of British and world history forever.
This is an exact replica of the Matthew, the craft he chose for their seemingly impossible mission.
A common cargo ship, she was more used to coastal trading than crossing oceans.
Only 78 feet long, she feels a tiny vessel for such a momentous journey into the unknown.
But what she lacked in space and sophistication,
she more than made up for in strength and reliability.
And in 1497 she was the best boat for the job.
So, crowded in and with no real idea of where they were going
or how long they would be at sea,
Cabot and his crew of 18 men pushed off into the abyss.
I want to know more about this boat that changed the world and sail her for myself.
In particular, I want to see the world as a 15th century sailor would have understood it.
I want to get inside their heads and find out exactly what they thought they were doing.
And what it must have been like to sail beyond the limits of the known world in this tiny little ship.
But to understand the Matthew and her voyage
we need to go back another 200 years,
to when Marco Polo made a momentous overland trip into Asia.
His book, The Marvels Of The World, talks of roofs tiled with gold,
chests filled with pearls and spices by the sack load.
As Europe emerged from the uncertainties of the medieval period, curiosity about the world
grew and John Cabot was given a copy of the book by none other than explorer Christopher Columbus.
And Polo's tales of Eastern riches convinced him
that he too could make his fortune and secure a name for himself.
But the problem was getting there.
Hard-line Ottomans controlled the trade routes and, for a Christian
explorer, a journey over land was more likely to end in a nasty death than untold riches.
If Cabot was to make his fortune, he needed to find another way - across the sea.
BELLS CHIME
In the 15th century, understanding of the world's oceans was extremely limited
and map making was the preserve of the monasteries.
The resulting world-view, more superstition than science,
can be seen in all its glorious confusion here at Hereford Cathedral
on the famous mappa mundi.
The map bears almost no relationship to the round world we now know,
but is based on myths and legend.
Drawn up by monks, it only shows how they imagined distant lands,
with no proper understanding of where they really were.
And for many people the belief was that beyond the edge of a map like this lay untold horrors.
But I, for one, believe that medieval
seamen had a much more sophisticated sense of the shape of our world.
As children, we were all shown images of medieval seamen sailing
over the edge of a flat earth and plunging down to destruction with expressions of despair.
Well, you know,
from the medieval seaman's point of view that was a load of absolute tosh.
They never thought that at all.
You see, they knew the world was round.
When you see a ship coming up over the horizon, the first thing you see are the top sails.
And, as she comes closer, the hull comes up.
First she's hull down, then she's hull up.
That's the old phrase, and it's nothing to do with her being too far away to see,
it's to do with her coming up over the edge of the world. They knew that full well.
They also knew when they looked at the horizon, they could see a
tiny little bit of curvature on it. It all stacked up.
For explorers to succeed, they needed maps based on
sound science that backed up the observations of sailor men.
And towards the end of the 15th century just such maps were appearing.
Hungry for knowledge, scholars were scouring library
shelves and discovering that the Greeks and Romans had known a lot more about the world than they did.
But for explorers, one work stood out.
Ptolemy, the great Roman mathematician, had already mapped much of Europe and Asia.
And when his maps were printed for the first time in 1477,
they caused a sensation.
The maps showed the extent of the known world,
a world that started in Spain and ended in China.
For anyone wanting to find a short cut to the riches of the East,
the maps offered a tantalizing idea -
an idea that would change the world forever.
Here's a flat world map.
If you're going to put it on a piece of paper, it's the only way you can do it, really.
But if you're a sailor and a world traveller,
or perhaps a scholar who understands that the world is round,
all you've got to do
is that.
And suddenly
you can go the other way.
There's another route altogether.
And it goes across this unknown ocean which, as yet,
nobody has mapped or even sailed across.
The idea was brilliantly simple.
If Cabot was right, he'd have found a shortcut to the treasures of the East.
But it was a huge gamble.
And to prove his point he'd need to find a wealthy backer
willing to pay for the boat and men required for the voyage.
So, Cabot arrived here in Bristol to try and bring his plan to life.
And I've come here to meet Dr Evan Jones, who has spent years studying Cabot's voyage.
I want to ask him more about the man behind this historic journey.
Well, Cabot - proper name Zuan Caboto - was a Venetian merchant.
But by 1489 he'd got into trouble.
And he left Venice as an insolvent debtor, then to be pursued by his creditors in Spain.
He goes to Valencia and he, first of all, proposes he's going to build a new harbour there.
But he doesn't get funding for that, so he moves on, with his creditors just behind him, moves on to Seville.
There he proposes the building of a bridge across the Guadalquivir.
But the whole thing falls through, and it seems to be only after that,
around about 1494-1495, he starts to a get a new idea.
What he's going to do is lead an expedition across the Atlantic.
So, first of all, he tries to persuade people in Seville to fund it. Doesn't get any joy.
He moves on to Lisbon, tries to persuade the Portuguese to fund him.
Again, no success.
It's only after that, in 1495, that he comes to London
and tries to backing there from Henry VII and his court.
Turned down all over Europe,
Cabot had finally found a willing patron in Henry VII,
a monarch desperate to play colonial catch-up with Spain and Portugal.
He immediately issued Cabot with a charter
giving him the power to claim whatever land he found as British.
"To find, discover and investigate whatsoever islands, countries,
"regions or provinces of heathens and infidels, in
"whatsoever part of the world placed which, before this time, were unknown to all Christians."
That's pretty non-PC these days.
What's it mean? It means that wherever Cabot went with his ship, so long as the territories
hadn't been found by Christians, which in practice meant the Spanish
or Portuguese, anything which is non-Christian, that's fair game.
These are heathens, you can do what you want.
Cabot had his theory.
He had a royal backer.
What he needed now was a boat.
When Cabot walked the Bristol waterfront
with the King's charter in one hand and the King's shilling in the other, he was looking for a ship.
A ship capable of a voyage of indeterminate length
through some of the roughest seas in the known world.
When he saw the Matthew, he knew he'd found her.
As an Italian, Cabot would have recognised the Matthew's lines immediately.
She was a caravel, a type of cargo ship popular in Southern Europe and Portugal.
But, as well as carrying cargo, the caravel was also starting to
make a name for herself in the world of exploration.
Two of the three boats Columbus sailed to the Caribbean
five years earlier were caravels.
And by the standards of the 15th century, they were considered
excellent sailing vessels - tough, versatile and seaworthy.
But judged by today's thinking, the Matthew leaves a lot to be desired.
Looking around with a seaman's eye, I can see that this vessel has serious limitations.
For a start, she's not going to be able to sail properly to windward, in our terms.
That means she'll go across the wind, either way, and downwind.
And if the wind's coming from where you want to go, tough luck, mate. You'll have to wait.
And for her crew, 18 men assembled from the dockside, a ragtag mixture
of able seamen, fortune hunters, a priest and a cook, it was going to be an uncomfortable ride because
she's built like a barrel, with a gently rounded hull designed to take the ground in rivers and harbours.
At sea, though, that means she'll roll from side to side, a sickly motion in any sort of swell.
But she gives a feeling of being strong and reliable.
Even the rig feels pretty bullet proof, actually.
And for the guys going off across the Western Ocean, that was probably the most important single thing.
When the crew stepped onto this boat, they may not all have been convinced by Cabot's theories.
But the boat certainly looked up to the job.
So, Cabot's got his charter, he's got his money and he's got his men.
And now we're going to go to sea on the Matthew and find out what it really felt like out there.
Seeing her out on the water for the first time,
it's obvious that she's definitely not built for speed.
But she feels like an honest boat.
And she was all Cabot had.
And, for better or worse, from now on his fate and the Matthew's would be inextricably linked.
So, in May 1497, Cabot and his men pushed off into the unknown.
And, with good weather ahead of them, the crew hoisted sail
in the hope of catching a fair wind westward.
Up here now the guys are preparing the foresail for hoisting.
Now, there's something very interesting about this.
It's taking half a dozen guys to hoist what is quite a small sail.
It probably was always like that.
This is a labour-intensive rig and there were plenty of men available.
But the second thing which is really interesting is that the sail is being hoisted from the deck.
Modern square riggers tend to keep their yards permanently aloft.
But on the Matthew the yards are stowed on deck.
The sails are prepared down there, then the whole shooting match is hoisted up the mast.
OK. Two, six. Heave! Heave!
It's tough, heavy work.
But with a new crew keen to get going
and put on a good show for their captain,
there'd have been no shortage of willing hands motivated
to wring every knot of speed from their boat.
Phew, a bit of a cardiac job, that.
Still, there she is. Up and drawing.
Skipper's up there on the poop asking for another foot when we were all thought we'd done.
Then we're there, then he asks for another.
They're all like that, skippers.
Once the sails were set,
the Matthew would be hoping for strong easterly winds.
Because of her rig, her progress is limited to sailing with the breeze.
If the weather was coming from the wrong direction, the crew would be struggling to make any headway.
Even more frustrating would be no wind at all.
That's how the sea deals with you very often.
Looking up aloft at these sails slashing against the mast, how many
times have I sat in mid-ocean looking at that, just praying for God to send me some wind?
It absolutely drives you nuts.
Everything's crashing and banging about because there are always waves slopping around that are left over
from the last bit of breeze that you had.
The sea is never quiet. The sails are banging, the ropes are chafing,
you can't get a moment's sleep.
Plus you're going nowhere.
And actually, if you're trying to get Newfoundland or Nova Scotia across the North
Atlantic, you're going backwards at 20 miles a day because that's where the current's taking you.
So that is the sort of frustration and sheer agony
that Cabot must have gone through when his ship was short of breeze.
That agony would have been felt throughout the crew.
And, to make matters worse, compared to today's comfort on
the high seas, living conditions would have been pretty gruesome.
And Rob Salvage, who looks after this perfect replica of the Matthew,
has a good idea of what life on board was like.
Sort of very pleasant mess deck, isn't it? Nice atmosphere.
It is and we have these canvas cots where we sleep now.
Very basic, but actually it wouldn't have been like this.
This would have been chock full of stores and provisions.
There would have been barrels, lots of sacks of grain, some root vegetables -
they would have brought everything they needed for the voyage.
And certainly the foodstuff would have all been down here.
They really didn't live down here at all.
No, I don't think so. They would have lived mostly on deck.
They would have been working hard. They would have been up on deck many hours at a time, getting exhausted.
Once they got on this ship and once they were up and running, and once they got into the routine of
battening things down, going through some heavy weather, drying out, getting things sorted out, mending...
You know, that routine of daily life on board would have been all that they would have thought about.
Working in shifts night and day, the men would need proper rest.
But with the only real cabin of the ship taken by Cabot,
the ship's master and a priest,
the sleeping arrangements would have been far from comfortable.
And not only that, the crew would be bedding down with the livestock.
Come on, girl.
Well, as you can see, there's enough space for me up here.
I could put a palliasse down here and doss down, I suppose, on the lee side on a quiet night.
But if I had ten or a dozen ship mates, it would be
no joke at all. But that's how it was.
You can't imagine, really, how these chaps managed to survive with this.
There was absolutely no comfort at all, let alone luxury.
And if the sleeping quarters were this rough,
I wasn't holding out too much hope for the food.
Bill Jones, the Matthew's chef, has researched the food they would have taken on the voyage.
He's preparing me a dish that's typical of what they'd have tucked in to 500 years ago.
What's cooking, Bill?
Well, we're cooking a bit of gruel. A bit of medieval gruel. Gruel?
That'll be nice, won't it? I don't know, I don't like the sound of that. What's in it?
Made from oat grains called groats, the ships cook would have added salted meats and anything else he
had to hand, stirring the whole lot into a sort of savoury mush.
And then we'll pour that in.
Water and all? Water and all.
They needed ingredients that would keep for months.
And, in those days, there wasn't much around.
Well, of course they hadn't discovered a lot of ingredients we use. They didn't have potatoes.
No potatoes, of course.
They didn't have tomatoes, they didn't have chillies, capsicums, things like that.
But they did have spices, because they'd got them from the Middle East.
We can use things like cloves, pepper they used a lot of.
Anything to help disguise the taste of the bland ingredients.
They liked sweet stuff as well as savoury, so a lot of honey was used in the cooking.
Today The Matthew is fitted with a modern galley, complete with gas and running water.
But back in 1497, cooking facilities would have been far more basic.
They would have cooked everything on deck and they would have had an open
fire in what was called a firebox, which was a metal box that they had the fire in.
So it would be on the open deck, they'd perhaps have some sort of cover if it was bad weather.
Everything would be done topside.
The proof is in the porridge, you might say.
I've eaten some dire concoctions on long voyages before, so I wonder how I'll fare this time?
Well, its lunch time and despite Bill's assurances,
none of the hands up there seem to be up for having the real thing.
Here goes.
I've never had anything quite like that in my life.
In texture it's a cross between a risotto and porridge.
But in taste, tastes great, not too salty.
I reckon if the lads ate this,
all the way across the Atlantic, they would arrive well fed...happy
and as long as the cook kept his duties going, morale would have been sky high.
And keeping morale up would have been crucial on a small boat like the Matthew...
when the monotony and uncertainty could drive even a seasoned sailor round the bend.
With all the preparation in the world
they really were playing a waiting game.
Day after day it would be the same old horizon.
An unchanged sea,
a familiar cloud pattern
and the constant motion of this lumbering boat.
These guys must have just sat in mid ocean rolling about like this.
My first lesson in 15th century seamanship is definitely patience
and I'm slowly beginning to understand how this ship sails.
So here we are, the guys wrestling to get the last tiny little fraction of a knot out of the vessel.
As they're taking an inch or two on the sheet here,
slacking away on a brace, doing their level best to see what
they can get out of the boat and actually what they're getting is about a knot and a half.
OK, a knot and a half. What's that? A mile and a half an hour?
You see in landsman's terms that's nothing.
But look at it like this,
a day at sea, is 24 hours and a knot and a half in 24 hours is 36 miles.
And that's how The Matthew crossed the Atlantic.
On a bad day she'd do 36 miles.
On a good day 100 plus.
And inch by inch, mile by mile, she clawed her way across an unknown ocean.
When I'm sailing an ocean myself I always like to show the crew
our progress on the chart to keep morale up.
But The Matthew didn't have a chart because no-one knew where they were going!
So just how did Cabot and his crew record the Matthew's progress?
This is a traverse board, this is a method for recording
the distances they were running and the courses they were steering.
So every half hour they would be putting a peg
in one of the concentric rings on the boards for direction and they would be putting a peg in the
board down here for speed.
There's eight rows of holes for the potential for one to eight-ish knots.
Many of the guys on the ship wouldn't have been able to read and write,
except for guys like Cabot, maybe a mate, maybe a priest.
Educated people.
So the rest of the watches, the rest of the crew would be recording
that critical information of course and speed with this board.
As the Matthew sailed west, the mood must have grown more tense by the day.
18 tough Bristol seamen and one increasingly
nervous Italian, who'd sold them his wild theory about land to the west.
But then, someone would have given the shout that
got Cabot off the hook and makes every navigator's heart soar...
Land ahoy!
Landfall after an ocean passage in a small sailing boat
is an absolutely magical experience.
You're a long time out there.
It might be two weeks, but it could easily be five or six,
sometimes more for guys like Cabot.
They weren't ever sure where they were going to get to until they arrived and finally
he sees a coast like that and he thinks to himself, "Have I made it?"
"Is this it? Is this where I make my name?"
He wasn't to know, but what he did know was that the wind was perhaps dying on him like this.
It so often does at the end of the day, close to land.
He could settle down and let the boat drift, let her roll,
be at piece knowing that at least for now he's arrived somewhere new.
After 2,000 miles and a month at sea, The Matthew arrived at what we now
know was somewhere in Eastern Canada.
They then sailed along the coast only to find an endless wilderness
that stretched out for miles in either direction.
They ventured ashore just once,
but there was no sign of the native Americans,
whose lives would ultimately be so disastrously affected
by the discovery.
Cabot decided to call it New Found Land -
A name which still stands today.
And with supplies running out
he wanted to make sure he could still make it back to Britain
with the triumphant news that he'd discovered a new continent.
So after just three days the order was given to bring the ship around.
This boat, The Matthew, had bravely brought them all this way and now
they were ready to return home, having claimed what would become North America for Britain.
As Columbus had claimed the Caribbean for Spain.
By the time Cabot and his crew got back to Bristol,
I wonder just what their mood would have been?
They'd discovered the country that
would one day be Britain's most influential colony.
But they weren't exactly weighed down with the spices, gold and silver that Cabot had promised.
Well, I've been for a sail on The Matthew.
I've stepped of her and I can have some inkling now of what it
must have been to have crossed the Atlantic on her.
But he didn't come home laden with the pearls of the Orient, did he?
I wonder if by the standards of his day the voyage was considered a bit of a damp squib?
Well, yeah, as you say, they were looking for China, they came back and all they found was North America.
I mean, what use was that?
So he didn't make any money at the time but by the end of the 16th century, the British Empire was being
founded and the voyages began to be recognised as England's first attempt to establish a maritime empire.
Later on, 16th century, 17th century, people became very interested in
these voyages as an example of that and today we are standing here by Cabot Tower.
This was built in 1897, just one of the monuments built
to celebrate what was seen by that time as a great imperial achievement.
Looking out over the harbour from which the Matthew set sail,
today Cabot tower is only one of the landmarks
commemorating Bristol's favourite adopted son.
But what happened to Cabot?
Having found land he wanted to learn more about this great continent to
the west and set out on another, far bigger expedition.
This time he was never heard of again.
But his discovery was the beginning of a new era.
And it was The Matthew that took him there.
This boat opened the door to an unknown continent.
Her voyage showed Britain a world beyond her shores
and started a thirst for knowledge and exploration
that would change this island nation and the people that live here forever.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd
E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk