Original subtitles

Narrator: A merciless complex designed for suffering...

There's dormitories.

There's what look to be classrooms.

There's workshops.

It's a big mystery.

Streets of a sunken pirate city

drenched in infamy...

The harbor walls are crumbling into the sea

and the whole area has been left to collapse.

And a shadowy subterranean complex

critical to defeating Hitler.

Looking at these doors,

never in your wildest dreams

could you imagine what lies beyond.

♪

Decaying relics,

ruins of lost worlds,

forged through years of toil,

now haunted by the past,

their secrets waiting to be revealed.

Captions by vitac... www.Vitac.Com

captions paid for by discovery communications

♪

♪

Off the coast of Croatia,

in the middle of the adriatic sea,

is an island few holiday makers dare to visit.

♪

Auerbach: It's a moonscape, barren.

There are mountains of rock piled up here, there.

It's a palette of gray and white.

♪

Nusbacher: This is an island that is not the least bit welcoming.

It is stark.

It is burned

and it's dead.

♪

Stretching up the hillside is a series of stepped ruins,

really just the outlines of walls.

If you look a little more closely,

you start noticing some sinister elements.

As you see this place surrounded by fencing,

machine gun posts, and barbed wire

and the mystery kind of thickens.

Narrator: A place built for a brutal purpose.

Nusbacher: This is an island dedicated to breaking the human spirit.

This is a place designed to dehumanize.

♪

Narrator: What was this incongruous settlement used for?

Who lived here, and were are they being protected

or held against their will?

♪

This sterile rocky outcrop

is goli otok.

Local historian darko bavoljak

has spent years scouring this desolate site.

♪

Interpreter: This is an island

where paranoia and violence reached their height.

Narrator: The more you explore this site, the more baffling it becomes.

♪

Wawro: As you get closer, there's, you know, sleeping quarters.

There's an auditorium.

It's hard to know what this place is.

Nusbacher: There is no readily apparent reason

why you would build this semi-industrial facility

on an island in the middle of the sea.

♪

Narrator: Goli otok's isolation is key to unlocking its past.

♪

Because it's off the coast, anything can happen out there.

The fate of the people there will never be known.

Nusbacher: Look at the bunkers.

This is a place that is designed to be patrolled,

designed to be defended.

But it's not, in any way, clear

what was worth guarding and patrolling here.

♪

Narrator: In fact, this site was a brutal prison.

It's known as Croatia's Alcatraz.

♪

Interpreter: The first prisoners arrived on this island

on July 9, 1949.

After that,

around 12,000 convicts passed through this place

and they built everything that you can see here.

♪

Narrator: But why did someone go to such lengths

to build a prison on this barren rock,

far out to sea and way out of sight?

♪

After the second world war,

this site was part of communist yugoslavia,

which was still aligned with Moscow,

but in 1949,

the infamous yugoslavian dictator marshal josip tito

broke away from the Soviet union and its leader Joseph Stalin.

But not all yugoslavians agreed with tito's vision.

They wanted to stay with Soviet-style communism,

and the ruthless dictator

had a harsh way of dealing with dissenters.

Tito wants to be able

to take people he thinks are loyal to Stalin

and make them disappear.

♪

Narrator: In his cold-blooded pursuit of power,

tito had turned on his own people.

He rounded up thousands of political prisoners

and sent them here, to the prison on goli otok.

This is tito's gulag.

The buildings are a stark reminder

of the immense paranoia of a regime

that didn't trust its own people.

They would spend years living under the harshest conditions,

huddling on this limestone island,

protected by a few blocks, being worked nearly to death.

Narrator: The inmates' punishing workload included quarrying,

excavating a network of tunnels,

and building the very fortifications

that kept them imprisoned.

♪

Interpreter: There are more than 100 bunkers on this island.

Many were used to stop prisoners escaping.

Narrator: Those unfortunate enough to end up here

were subjected to tito's relentless reeducation machine,

a machine that would turn darker than anyone could imagine.

♪

Here is a place that was built, built up,

made almost brutally magnificent

in its ability to cause people misery and pain,

so that they would be compliant.

Narrator: Yugoslavia's secret police

kept a close watch for the slightest indiscretion.

The fear of being snatched and sent to goli otok

became part of Yugoslav society.

Auerbach: The psychological trauma is immense.

Imagine being literally disappeared,

bearing seized for crimes

you don't even know you're being accused of,

so quickly and so secretly, that even your friends

and family don't know where you've gone.

♪

Sometimes people executed their personal grudges

by informing upon people

that had not really committed any political crimes!

They just want to see them sent to goli otok.

♪

Narrator: Did any of these enemies of the state survive

to tell the tale

or did yugoslavia's disappeared vanish forever?

♪

Narrator: Off the coast of Croatia is goli otok,

marshal tito's brutal prison,

which started reeducating political dissenters in 1949.

But something more perverse than that was at play.

A small number of senior officials

would have overseen this gulag,

but they were not responsible for keeping order.

The prison discipline was actually carried out,

in large part, by the inmates themselves.

♪

So newcomers arrived.

The older inmates were forced to whip them as they passed by.

Narrator: Those who survived rose through the ranks

to mete out their own form of terror,

as barracks supervisors.

Interpreter: The barrack supervisor was the master of life and death.

He could order any prisoner to viciously beat another.

These brutal conditions created a kind of prison hierarchy

where prisoners were encouraged to humiliate each other,

to inform on one another, to beat one another.

Nusbacher: Everybody was an informer.

Everybody was an abuser.

Everybody was violent.

And nobody felt safe.

♪

About 600 died on the island,

which means, you know, thousands returned to the mainland

after being broken and reeducated,

but those who came back, they didn't dare say a word.

♪

Auerbach: What were they afraid of?

What if someone informed on them again

and they were returned to goli otok?

♪

Narrator: This fear rippled through Yugoslav society

until 1989,

when the collapse of the Berlin wall

marked the beginning of the end for communism

and tito's gulag closed down.

♪

Today, the crumbling buildings of goli otok

are a haunting reminder of tito's totalitarian regime.

♪

All of us in the west, we allowed ourselves to think

that, unlike the other communist dictatorships,

tito's dictatorship was not founded

on brutality and prison camps.

Of course, we were wrong.

♪

Narrator: In the swampy wetlands of Louisiana,

in a region with a fractured past,

lies a sprawling site with a shameful story to tell.

♪

Wawro: It seems entirely otherworldly

because you've got the bayou.

You've got the strange wildlife,

you've got snakes crawling through the grass.

You've got crocodiles.

♪

It's pretty forbidding.

In this landscape,

not only do you have the remains of buildings,

like brick foundations barely exposed,

you also have existing structures,

very, very simple wooden structures, simple cabins.

Narrator: These buildings and the abandoned machinery

that lies submerged in the steaming swamps around them,

hold the clues to what this site once was.

In the distance, you can see

some kind of a crane or industrial facility

and some other heavy equipment

laying around in state of disrepair.

♪

So, it looks like we're coming upon

a basic agricultural establishment,

but for what, exactly?

♪

There is a sense of foreboding

that something might've happened here,

that you can't quite figure out what.

♪

Narrator: Who were the workers forced to call this place home

and how were their lives entwined

with the history of a divided America?

♪

This site is a puzzle.

Is it industrial?

A small train and other assorted pieces of machinery

rust away in the Southern humidity,

but the cluster of shacks and a deserted school

hint at a community.

But where has everyone gone?

♪

Paul Leslie is a local historian

who has spent years studying the history of the site.

♪

Leslie: I came here around 1977

and so, I pretty much discovered it then.

And I was just completely stung

by the presence of so many buildings.

It was like a time capsule.

Narrator: The story of this site begins

with a product the whole world craved...

Sugar.

♪

What we're seeing here is a sugar plantation,

a kind of agriculture that was very common

in the U.S. in the 19th century and before.

Sugar was really an integral part of the Louisiana economy

because it was the ultimate cash crop.

♪

Narrator: This isn't just any sugar plantation.

It's Laurel valley,

once one of the largest plantations in north America.

♪

In the 1830s,

a family by the name of Tucker arrived

and took over this land

and began building up the plantation.

Narrator: But their ambition came at a cost.

♪

Mitchell: The Tucker family arrive with a couple of dozen slaves.

Within 20 years,

they have almost 170 slaves.

It's a phenomenally large slave holding family.

The process of making sugar was a really brutal one

and it was incredibly difficult for the laborers involved.

Narrator: At the heart of the tuckers' operation was the mill.

♪

Wawro: This is the old sugar mill.

It's built in the 1840s,

built with bricks that were made on the plantation by the slaves

and then assembled painstakingly,

something like 366,000 slave-made bricks.

♪

The mill was operatin' 24 hours a day.

It never shut down, unless the equipment broke.

Narrator: The work was brutal.

The day here at Laurel valley was one that started

at around 7:30 and ended close to 8:00.

It wasn't an uncommon thing

to have people plowin' in the fields at night.

As far as the working conditions, they were hard.

The average life expectancy was around 25 years of age.

Meigs: This is slave labor in some very difficult conditions

down here in the swamps,

with mosquitoes and malaria and the blazing sun.

So there was no easy place to be a slave,

but this was probably one of the worst places.

♪

Workers started at very young age,

about 8, 9, 10.

Narrator: Life as a slave was so harsh that, for some,

bringing a child into this world was too much.

You have infamous stories of mothers deciding

to commit infanticide,

rather than subject a child to slavery.

♪

Narrator: The deserted structures at Laurel valley hint

at the cruelty of day-to-day life.

Meigs: Imagine living in these swamps,

in one of these primitive houses.

No screens on the windows to keep out the mosquitoes.

There were probably, you know, five people to a room,

very, very primitive and difficult conditions.

♪

Narrator: But a violent series of events

would soon change the fortunes of America, the tuckers,

and the people they had enslaved.

♪

♪

Narrator: Deep in the swamp lands of Louisiana,

a deserted 19th-century sugar plantation stands

as a testimony to human greed.

The southerners,

they saw slavery as the bedrock of their economy

and, you know, it's sort of an economic nonsense, in a way,

because it's been proven over and over

that slavery was an inefficient way to run anything.

And, yet, slavery had become so entwined with Southern culture.

Narrator: Few families felt stronger about this than the tuckers.

Once the civil war

broke out,

Caleb Tucker left Laurel valley in 1863

and went to join the confederate army.

For a man like Caleb Tucker,

who has considerable slave holdings,

the notion of emancipating his enslaved labor force

is akin to bankrupting himself.

Narrator: When the union won the war,

Tucker's choice to fight against them

had a catastrophic impact on his plantation.

The local union authorities exacted real retribution on him.

We know for a fact that union authorities,

you know, plundered the plantation.

So as a result, the plantation,

in the latter stages of the civil war,

really falls upon hard times.

♪

Narrator: At the end of the war,

the tuckers sold their plantation

and the Laurel valley slaves were finally free,

but hope of a better life soon vanished.

Racial bigotry and low wages

meant their working conditions hardly improved.

In 1887,

the workers organized a mass strike,

but an all-white militia was sent in to respond.

Mitchell: They not only try to kill strikers,

they also end up massacring black civilians,

black people who are in the town.

And so historians don't have a very strong sense

of exactly how many blacks were killed,

but it was dozens, it was scores,

of people being murdered, being slaughtered.

♪

Narrator: The strikers had little choice

but to return to work in the same sugar fields

and the plantation grew again.

A boom between 1890 and 1924 meant more building at the site.

Meigs: They had huge cranes

for loading the cane and loading the product.

They had miles of railroad tracks.

They had to move around a lot of material

and they were willing to invest a lot

in the infrastructure to make that happen.

♪

Narrator: But the great depression of the 1930s

brought economic disaster

to the sugar industry and Southern Louisiana.

Eventually, the workers' cabins emptied

and the sugar mill closed for good.

♪

Today, Laurel valley still stands.

The fields are used to grow sugar cane,

but the basic houses now lie empty.

Meigs: This particular site is a window

into a part of our history, part of world history,

and, as tragic as it is,

it's also really important to recognize it.

It's a story that needs to be told.

♪

Narrator: Perched on a remote coast in the Scottish highlands

is a collection of structures

that keep silent vigil over the sea.

♪

Up on the cliffs, you're swept away by the natural beauty.

♪

But if you look down at your feet,

you'll find concrete foundations.

Man's been here and he's created things and then taken them away.

Narrator: But this is not the only enigma in these faraway foothills.

Concealed in dense grassland

is an inauspicious portal to a momentous past.

If you don't know what you're looking for,

you are never going to find it in this landscape.

You can just about make out big steel doors

that appear to lead right into the mountainside.

Never in your wildest dreams

could you imagine what lies beyond.

Narrator: Whatever it is,

it's too clandestine to appear on local maps.

It's what you don't see

that's even more impressive about this complex.

Secrecy was very, very key to the entire operation.

Narrator: But what is there is monumental.

It's when you make a noise

that you realize the scale of this place.

Narrator: Why go out of your way to hide this enormous facility

and what is its connection to the clifftop ruins?

♪

The link between the gateway in the woods

and the clifftop structures starts two miles away,

with huge metal drums in the town of invergordon.

You're looking at a kind of industrial complex

and it's a very, very important site.

You suddenly realize there are these massive, round structures

heading off as far as the eye can see.

♪

Rows and rows of these rusting circular domes

stretch out into the distance.

Narrator: Military archaeologist Alan kilpatrick

has studied this area for decades.

Kilpatrick: The site is very impressive.

Its engineering and its quality of its engineering

is absolutely first-rate.

Narrator: These enormous metal structures date back

to the early 20th century.

Built, initially, in 1913,

the fact that they're still here today,

having had no maintenance for over 25 years

or thereabouts,

they're still stunning, in amazing condition.

♪

Inside these circular domes, it's almost pitch black

and covered in this almost powdery white substance.

It's quite spooky.

Narrator: The white powder is organic material

that betrays the fact that these tanks have lain empty for years,

but these were once filled

with the 20th century's black gold...

Oil.

♪

The largest of these enormous steel tanks

is almost 120 feet high and 45 feet across.

The whole tank farm

could hold hundreds of thousands of tons of oil.

Kilpatrick: You had 44 oil tanks constructed.

Each one of these tanks contained

5,000 tons of fuel oil.

♪

Narrator: So, what happened to all this oil

and what connects it to the coastal ruins

and the dark secret in the mountainside?

♪

♪

In the east of Scotland

lies a 100-year-old tank farm that was once

the biggest fuel depot in the country.

In the first world war,

it was a key royal Navy facility.

♪

When you consider the importance

of fuel to the Navy,

it's as important as ammunition or guns.

No fuel, no fleet.

♪

Narrator: Invergordon sits on the cromarty firth,

a deep inland waterway that leads out to the north sea.

♪

Barratt: Invergordon was really, really important strategically.

That ships could slip in under the cover of darkness,

fuel up, and then disappear off.

♪

Narrator: Thanks to invergordon,

the royal Navy maintained unmatched power

and ensured victory over Germany in the first world war.

But the clifftop structures east of invergordon suggest

that the safety of the fuel depot

would soon be under threat.

These are the remains

of the north sutor coast battery.

Constructed in 1913,

it had been upgraded to guard against the new threat

to the Navy's precious oil

by the start of the second world war.

♪

All this effort was to try and protect it

from aerial attack because aerial attack was

the major threat to the royal Navy.

Narrator: And, when Germany occupied Norway in 1941,

they gained a coastline

within striking distance of Scotland.

♪

In February 1941,

a junkers 88 came tearing in over invergordon.

It carried out a solo attack,

dropping two 500-pound bombs.

♪

It collapsed tank 13,

spilling oil down the adjacent railway line

and down into the firth itself.

♪

Tank 13 was never rebuilt, so, now,

it is a gap in the tank farm.

Narrator: The British had foreseen this danger

and, for the last four years, had been building a solution

for storing even more fuel nearby.

But there's no sign of the site.

If you didn't know where to locate this entrance,

you wouldn't know this place even existed.

♪

There is a door in the mountainside

made out of incredibly thick steel

and very firmly bolted to the concrete.

Behind this unassuming portal into this hillside

lies one of the finest examples of civil engineering.

♪

This is one of two tunnels

that lead into this remote highland hillside

500 feet above invergordon.

Narrator: It's only by venturing deeper

that the true nature of the complex is revealed.

♪

The access tunnel here is over 220 meters long.

♪

Narrator: A few meters later,

and the tunnel seems to end entirely.

Once you get to the end of that corridor,

you realize there is another way forward,

but it's through a much, much smaller pipeline.

The staff would have to lie flat on this wheeled board,

that they'd then be pushed through the pipes.

Narrator: They would emerge into a monstrous void.

The space which is ahead of me

is vast.

It is the size...

In fact, actually bigger, than a medieval cathedral.

The sheer size of this,

780 feet long by 30 feet wide by 52 feet high.

It really is an impressive piece of engineering.

♪

Narrator: This is just one of six tanks

that make up the inchindown underground fuel depot.

The first was completed in 1941

and each one could hold 5.6 million gallons of fuel.

♪

At more than 400 feet below ground,

no German bomb could reach the Navy's vital reserve.

♪

A system of pumps and piping carried it down to invergordon.

♪

The fuel flowed down four miles of pipes,

from the tanks down to the naval base.

Kilpatrick: 600 men were involved.

Massive amount of tunneling.

A quarter of a million cubic meters of sandstone

removed from this facility.

♪

Narrator: This impressive feat of engineering

would soon play a critical role

in the largest seaborne invasion in history.

♪

♪

Narrator: Towards the end of the second world war,

unbeknown to the Germans, a vast system of oil tanks

lay in wait below a Scottish hillside.

Corum: In world war two, this one facility

can support the fleet for considerable time.

And, without bases like this, you have no royal Navy.

In 1944,

many of the vessels heading south

towards the beaches of normandy for the d-day landings

refueled here at invergordon.

It was a crucial part of the naval infrastructure.

Narrator: It was critical to allied victory in the second world war.

♪

After the war,

the world-class engineering of the inchindown oil tanks

meant they continued to play an important strategic role.

This facility was, all through the cold war,

a very, very important, and very secure, site

for your fuel storage, for logistics, for the Navy.

There were plans to upgrade the site for use by NATO,

but, these plans were later abandoned

and, in 2002, the site was officially closed.

That is an incredible journey and an amazing life span

for something that was first constructed in 1941.

♪

Narrator: The outstanding engineering of the vast inchindown oil tanks

continues to break records to this day,

including what's thought to be

the longest-lasting reverberation.

It measured about 117 seconds of reverberance

before the sound finally tailed to nothing.

♪

Narrator: In the south of Jamaica,

at the mouth of the Kingston harbor,

a windswept Caribbean village hides a hell-raising past.

♪

Selwood: It's a thin peninsula, stretching out into the sea.

You can see, from the way the wind whips the trees,

that this is an exposed area.

♪

Gough: A long building stretches along the coastline.

The plaster's peeling off the walls

and it's been battered by the elements.

♪

Narrator: Scattered clues point to a military purpose.

Jerram: You've got imposing walls

and there's a tower with some arches.

There's a huge courtyard

with strange wooden shapes in the floor.

Turn a corner and there's a line of cannons

in various states of disrepair,

some rusting, some looking as though they're ready to fire.

♪

Narrator: Further exploration reveals

something went seriously awry here.

You can see that the whole building

has been upended on one side, but remains perfectly intact.

What force could've moved the entire structure?

The way the harbor walls are crumbling into the sea

and the whole place being so quiet,

there's a real sense that something happened here

that we're not getting the full picture,

that there's something under the water.

Narrator: How did the sunken relics of manmade structures

end up beneath the waves?

What was this mysterious settlement?

♪

An incongruous red brick fort overshadows the sleepy harbor,

suggesting the focus here has not always been on fishing.

This is a military space, but what period it is from

and what they're protecting is not immediately apparent.

Narrator: What was so worth defending

on this far-flung Jamaican coast?

♪

This point is right in the middle

of the Caribbean's busiest trading routes

of the 17th century.

This meant money,

and money always needs defending.

Narrator: This is port royal.

400 years ago,

this forgotten backwater was the Jewel of the Caribbean.

Local archaeologist dorick gray

knows how the English pried it out of Spanish hands.

♪

The fort rapidly expanded.

And so did the town, and port royal soon became one

of the most important cities in the world.

When it was built, this town was bigger than Boston

and had more money than all of London.

♪

Narrator: But a financial prize so far from home

wasn't easy for the English to protect.

Selwood: They then did something incredibly risky and unusual.

They sent an open invitation to the most lawless

and ruthless criminals on the planet

to come and make it their home...

Pirates.

♪

Narrator: The second half of the 17th century

was the golden age of piracy,

with as many as 5,000 pirates at large.

Port royal soon became their capital.

Could the abandoned structures that litter port royal

have been home to these buccaneers?

Selwood: It seems like a crazy idea,

but it was a "better the devil you know" move.

By getting these libertarians on their side,

the British were asking them to attack the Spanish ships,

thereby protecting their own trade

and diminishing their enemies.

Narrator: Port royal thrived under pirate rule

and grew into an outlaw town of 8,000 inhabitants.

♪

The Caribbean was like the wild west

of the 17th century

and port royal was like dodge city.

♪

Selwood: It was said that one in four buildings in port royal

was a bar or a brothel.

This city was known around the world as the wicked city.

♪

Narrator: Clues to the city's fate lie beneath the waves.

There was something far more menacing on the horizon,

that neither the British, nor their pirate army,

could defend against.

♪

Narrator: Ruins scattered around the Jamaican harbor of port royal

indicate that a legendary pirate city once stood here.

The remains of abandoned streets

have been found in the murky waters around the site

and holes in a century-old wall

show where most of the city disappeared.

♪

♪

Why did port royal vanish beneath the waves?

♪

A curious building tilting precariously

into Jamaica's soft, Sandy rock

points at port royal's violent geology.

♪

♪

Narrator: The Caribbean archipelago is a geologically active area.

Jerram: Jamaica sits exactly where the Caribbean plate

and the gonave microplate meet.

They meet side-by-side

in what's called a transform fault

and this fault rubs

against each other as things move

and that can cause violent juddering and earthquakes,

but also, some of those earthquakes can be quite shallow

and cause violent changes on the earth's surface.

♪

♪

These heavy buildings suddenly found themselves

not on solid sort of Sandy substrate,

but on a liquid Sandy substrate.

What was solid land all of a sudden becomes liquid

and things sink into it.

And, as the earthquake stopped,

then the sand then essentially resolidified itself,

trapping the buildings within it, and even people.

Narrator: 2,000 people died almost instantly.

Another 3,000 would die later, from disease.

But that was just the beginning.

♪

The earthquake, being coastal, also created a Tsunami

and it's reported that the sea moved

about a mile away from the land

before then coming crashing in with violent waves

that attacked the city from the seaward side.

♪

Gough: The city can no longer function.

It was over.

Many believed this was retribution,

all of the debauchery and sin

wiped off the earth by god's wrath.

Narrator: More than 1,000 acres of port royal was destroyed.

The pirate capital never returned to its riotous heyday,

but its strategic location saw it reborn a century later.

Gough: One of britain's most celebrated naval officers

was called into service here.

In 1779, Horatio Nelson was put in charge

of 500 men at fort Charles.

Narrator: Admiral Nelson did all he could

to prevent port royal disappearing back into the sea.

This naval hospital was ingeniously designed,

with large parts of the building premade in britain

and then shipped out to Jamaica.

♪

It also survived another earthquake, in 1907.

This earthquake was really

the sort of final nail in the coffin

and, after this, most people fled the town.

♪

Mother nature has finally claimed

the once-infamous pirate city,

consigning its nefarious secrets

to the depths of Davy Jones' locker.

♪

Marine excavation takes time and Patience

and, although there's been a few digs over the years,

there's huge swathes of the city that have yet to be explored,

so who knows what treasures still lie hidden beneath?

♪

♪