Back from the Dead: Nelson's Navy

More AoS tv for any of you guys in the UK or with access to the 4oD player. Tomorrow night at 20.00 Channel 4 are showing an episode of the forensic archaeology series Back from the Dead which focuses on Nelson's Navy. Blurb as follows:

Three-hundred-and-fifty skeletons, exhumed from Royal Navy graveyards from the age of Nelson's Navy, are throwing an extraordinary new light on how these sailors lived, fought, outwitted their enemy, and, from the oldest to youngest, suffered for victory.

These men were the beating heart of the most victorious fleet in history and never have so many of these sailors' remains been available for forensic investigation.

Six remarkable stories stand out: the child sailor, the top man, the American gunner, the freed slave, the marine and the victim of the sailor's most dreaded disease: syphilis.

Although the blurb doesn't mention it I presume this programme is about the Royal Haslar Hospital excavations undertaken by the Centre for Archaeological and Forensic Analysis at Cranfield University. Channel 4 also showed a Time Team special edition on the Haslar excavations last year: Nelson's Hospital.


You can find out more about Haslar Hospital at the Haslar Heritage Group and there's a short article about the excavations in Antiquity Burials of eighteenth-century Naval personnel - preliminary results from excavations at the Royal Hospital Haslar, Gosport