Back from the Dead: Nelson's Navy

[anteros_lmc]

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

Comments

[eglantine-br.livejournal.com]

I wonder if the under 20 with the slashed humerous was a mid. Poor guy. Very moving, those old bones.

[anteros-lmc.livejournal.com]

The child was an eleven year old who had had his leg amputated below the knee. They speculated that he may have been a powder monkey who suffered from a splinter wound. The poor little mite died three weeks after the operation, probably from an infection. It was a rather good programme and the forensics were pretty much spot on. Although I would have to take issue with the expert who described evidence of syphilis on bones from this period as unusual! Some of the scenarios presented were a leetle bit speculative but on the whole they were also pretty realistic. The reconstructions were fabulously gruesome and partner (who happens to be a nurse) actually had to leave the room at one point!

The programme's on youtube here but I don't know if it can be viewed outside the UK.

[lady-branwyn.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I wish I could watch the show.

[anteros-lmc.livejournal.com]

It was rather interesting! See comment to eglantine_br above... It's on youtube here but I don't know if it's accessible outside the UK.

Although it was really rather gruesome in places it also ended on a positive note as two of the individuals featured survived their wounds and died many years later as pensioners at Greenwich Hospital.

[eglantine-br.livejournal.com]

Looks like I cannot get it. I take it they could tell he was 11 from his bone growth plates or whatever...

Poor little guy, I hope they were kind to him, at the end. What a rotten deal for a little boy.

[anteros-lmc.livejournal.com]

What a scunner. I wish I could record these programmes for you :/

I take it they could tell he was 11 from his bone growth plates or whatever
Yep, spot on. They didn't explain the technique in the programme but you can estimate the age of an adolescent skeleton by looking at which bones have fused. They also did isotopic analysis of the bones which suggested the poor lad had lacked protein while he was growing up but I suppose that would not have been uncommon at the time.

Poor little guy, I hope they were kind to him, at the end
I hope so too.

They also presented the case of a seaman who died of tertiary syphilis in the asylum side of Haslar Hospital. That's where poor Basil Hall ended his days :(

[eglantine-br.livejournal.com]

I know he became unmoored at the end of his life. Do you know what the problem was?

[anteros-lmc.livejournal.com]

Unmoored. Yes I believe he did become unmoored but I don't know why. There is a new biography of Hall due out later this year which I am dying to get my hands on. Particularly as it is written by one of a school of authors who are influenced by the writing of one of my favourite poets and philosophers, Kenneth White.