Original subtitles

- [Narrator] Greenwich, England.

The heart of a nation built on sea power

and home to museum with secrets dark and strange.

The mark of Horatio Nelson's deadly assassin.

The magical bullet of Captain William Bligh.

The final hours of Sir John Franklin's Arctic expedition

and a deadly device that foiled an empire.

Secrets hidden in plain sight inside

the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.

(eerie music)

Just east of central London, on the banks of the Thames

river is Greenwich, home to the National Maritime Museum.

The museum's collection celebrates Great Britain's

proud seafaring heritage which dates back almost 1000 years.

Through exploration, innovation and conflict,

the Royal Navy led Britain's conquest of the seas

and became a breeding ground for heroes

from the famous to the infamous.

From Sir John Franklin to William Bligh,

Captain of the ill-fated Bounty

but none was greater than this man, Admiral Horatio Nelson.

- Horatio Nelson was born in 1758.

He joined the navy when he was a 12 year old boy.

- [Narrator] Nelson rose through the ranks

to Vice Admiral and wore this uniform

during his finest hour, the battle of Trafalgar in 1805.

One of Britain's most legendary naval victories.

- Nelson wasn't just a British celebrity

during his lifetime, he actually enjoyed enormous

European fame because he was seen to be one of the most

potent adversaries of Napoleon that Europe had to offer.

- [Narrator] But Nelson's jacket clearly shows

that his finest hour was also his last.

On the left shoulder is the entry point of a fatal bullet

that killed Britain's great hero.

(dramatic music)

Naval historian Sam Willis takes us

onto the deck of HMS Victory, Admiral Nelson's flagship

from the battle of Trafalgar and the scene of his death.

- Nelson would've been down here on the quarter deck

during the battle, absolutely in the thick of things,

with smoke clouding the view, with cannons roaring,

splinters would've been flying everywhere.

Very dangerous place to be.

(cannon firing)

- [Narrator] The charge toward the center

of Napoleon's fleet brought the Victory

into close contact with the French ship, Redoutable.

- This is where the Redoutable was and her rigging

was locked together with the Victory's rigging.

Her guns were so close to the Victory's hull

that they were actually touching the hull

and as well as these masked men on the Redoutable's decks

there were snipers in her rigging.

And it was at that moment, at this spot,

that Nelson was struck.

He immediately knew that he'd been hit very badly.

He said, "I think they've broken my back."

- [Narrator] He was carried four decks below to the surgery.

- It was very dark, it was very grim.

There would've been sounds of screaming and dying men

and the bullet had gone in through his shoulder,

it had broken two ribs, it had punctured a lung

and then it had lodged itself in his spine

and as he lay there he said he felt a pulsing

in his chest and the bullet had cut one of his arteries.

- [Narrator] Surrounded by his loyal crew,

Nelson died three hours later.

Who fired the fatal shot?

For decades, many stories arose about who the man

behind the bullet could have been

including one report from a Frenchman who claimed

it was his shot that killed Nelson,

fired from the rigging of the Redoutable.

He took four bullets with him and he said,

"If I don't kill Nelson with three of these bullets,

"I'm gonna use the last one to kill myself."

When you hear that account the first thing

that strikes you is it's not possible really.

It's like someone trying to grab their own piece of fame,

trying to put their own stamp on history.

- [Narrator] So are we to believe this French account?

Was Britain's greatest war hero

the target of a skilled marksman?

Or was he simply the victim of a random gunshot?

This is our museum secret.

- Hi Ian.

- Hiya Sam.

- Thank you very much for coming along.

- [Narrator] Sam Willis had enlisted the help

of artillery expert Ian Hen who has brought

a replica French musket with him.

Unlike the rifles of later decades this musket is not

the ideal weapon for precise target shooting.

- The balls are not exactly spherical,

they didn't always come out the center

of the barrel of the musket.

They may have come out of the top or the bottom

or one side and that would've affected

whether they would've ended up on target.

- Well I think the first thing we should do

is test the accuracy of these muskets.

What do we need?

- If I grab the musket, if you grab the tape measure,

we'll measure out and see what we can get on with.

- Well, here's our Nelson dummy.

We know he was a bit shorter than this

but it'll do for our purposes.

- It will do, yes.

- He won't feel a thing.

- (laughs) Let's measure it out

and see how far away we can do it.

- [Narrator] Ian will try a close range shot

at just 10 meters from the target.

- So what we need to do now is to pull the gun

back to full cock and it's ready to fire.

- Right.

(gun cocking)

(gun firing)

- [Sam] Think you got him?

- [Ian] I think we got him, yes.

- [Sam] There.

- There we go look.

- We're you aiming for the main chest area?

- Well I was aiming for the main torso.

- Yep.

- You see, with the smoothbore musket

you do have accuracy problems,

you don't where it's gonna come out of the bore.

- [Narrator] Even at close range

the musket isn't that accurate

and on the day of the battle the shot

would've been considerably more complicated.

It's been calculated that Nelson was standing

16 meters away from the base of the mizzen-mast

at the French ship at the moment he was shot.

- 15, 16 meters there

in your hand. - 16 meters so that's here.

Let's wave the truck back.

- [Narrator] And the shooter was 15 meters up the mast.

- That's much higher than I thought.

- [Ian] OK!

- How you doing?

That is 15 meters off the ground.

That's the height of the Redoutable's mizzen-mast.

From down there it looked incredibly high

but from here it's surprisingly close,

bearing in mind that that's an enemy ship.

That's gonna be rigging full of enemy soldiers.

- [Narrator] In the chaos of battle,

canons would be firing and gun powder smoke

would be wafting across the ship's decks.

Sam wants to factor that into the equation too.

(distant shouting)

(dramatic music)

(fuse fizzling)

(canon firing)

(musket firing)

- I think he hit the mannequin.

Unbelievably he shot him in the left shoulder.

That's absolutely amazing.

So even with the noise and the smoke

of the cannon, he's managed to shoot him

on the left shoulder, just below the epaulet,

exactly where Nelson was shot which is an extraordinary shot

and it's completely not what I expected to happen.

- [Narrator] Ian's bullet has gone right through the dummy,

penetrating the center of the back where the spine would be.

- It's extraordinarily similar, what's happened here.

If you compare what happened with Nelson

with what we've managed to recreate

from the angles, from the distance and from the height.

We need to re-think that moment of Nelson's death

and to consider the fact that he was deliberately

targeted by a French marksman.

- [Narrator] The French shot was heard around the world

and with the death of a national hero a legend was born.

Admiral Nelson was immortalized in British memory

and continues to command from his pedestal

on high over Trafalgar Square.

Next on Museum Secrets, a deadly Infernal Machine.

(dramatic music)

Hidden away in the storerooms

of the National Maritime Museum

lies surprising mementos of Britain's fighting past.

These are the naval weapons that helped

Britain rule the waves but in the 19th century

the Royal Navy faced a new kind of weapon.

A hidden threat that lurked

beneath the surface of the ocean.

- This is the Russian Infernal Machine.

It's a sea mine from the time of the Crimean war

and as you can see, this one has been taken

by the British as a war trophy and has been painted up,

Russian Infernal Machine, Baltic, 1855.

- [Narrator] Sea mines have been a threat

to warships going back to the Chinese in the 14th century

and they continue to represent a significant threat today.

Marine mines filled with TNT are now computerized

and fitted with electronic fuses

for remote or automatic detonation.

(mine exploding)

They are capable of colossal explosions.

(mine exploding)

Naval mines present such a danger

that there are entire fleets devoted

to finding and defusing them.

This is HMS Chiddingfold, one of 15 Royal Navy

mine hunter vessels.

All mine hunters carry ROVs, Remote Operated Vehicles,

equipped with cameras that allow mine hunters

to get a good look at the mine from a safe distance

and diffuse it or destroy it. (mine explodes)

In the 19th century, naval mines and the methods

used to deal with them were considerably less sophisticated.

If they were identified and fished

out of the water intact, these new weapons were treated

with equal parts caution and curiosity.

But as one newspaper report from the time illustrates,

this curiosity got the better of one man in particular.

Royal Naval Admiral Seymour.

- Seymour, with his officers, was extremely interested

in the device so he whacked the side of the mine

and it blew up knocking back the officers,

burning off their mustaches and their eyebrows

and poor Admiral Seymour was blinded in one eye as result.

(explosion) (men screaming)

- [Narrator] Back in the 1850s, mines were armed

with gunpowder that had to be ignited

without the use of electronics or batteries.

So how did the Russian Infernal Machine work

and why did these men survive its blast?

This is our museum secret.

(quirky music)

The investigation begins in Whiltshire

with chemist and explosives engineer, Doctor Sydney Alfred.

Today he's going to try to build a functioning

Russian Infernal Machine for the first time.

- There is something singularly bizarre

about this mine and it is it's general shape.

It is a cone; it is conical.

Where it came from, I don't know.

- [Narrator] No functioning Infernal Machine exists today.

Sydney has only a few crude sketches

from the period to work with.

- My guess is that the gunpowder was introduced

in the bottom through this fitting here.

This serves, of course you can see, to attach the rope.

So the thing was designed to float

and by attaching this line where it is,

it would automatically float vertically,

go something like this in the sea.

- [Narrator] So, bobbing just under the water

how was the Russian Infernal Machine designed to detonate?

- If I were to hit it here, so this goes upwards...

- [Narrator] Sydney might have the answer.

- What is in this hole is the tube,

which would have been almost certainly

thin board metal, probably steel.

- [Narrator] Inside this tube

is a glass vial containing sulfuric acid.

When the mine is struck my a ship, the vial breaks,

releasing the acid into a chemical mixture just below it.

This interaction creates a flame, igniting the gunpowder.

Believing he's worked out the mechanics,

Sydney has built a scale model to test his design.

- [Man] Whoa!

- [Narrator] This shallow pool represents a Russian harbor.

This wooden dingy, a British warship.

- [Sydney] Right, electrical connection coming up.

- [Narrator] In the interest of safety,

Sydney is going to attempt to detonate

the mine from several meters away.

- [Sydney] That will cause the mine

to dangle at the right...

- [Narrator] Placed just under the ship's hull

it will be in the same position as the original

Infernal Machines that detonated

on contact with ships passing over them.

- I'm ready to fire.

Firing, five, four, three, two, one.

(mine exploding)

(water splashing) (dramatic music)

(boat crashing)

- (laughs) Had I been a Russian,

I would've been delighted with that result.

Just hope it wasn't my own ships.

Let's see what it's done to the boat.

It has almost certainly perforated it.

It's listing heavily.

There's some material which is burning,

on fire, projected upwards.

That was the top of the mine which blew off,

not surprisingly and that is pretty catastrophic damage.

Had it been a naval vessel

and the magazine were there where they keep

their powder and shot and so on, or anywhere near,

the whole thing I think would have quite disintegrated.

- [Narrator] So why didn't the Infernal Machine

that blew up in the face of Admiral Seymour

and his men do more damage?

Sydney thinks he knows why.

- I would expect that much powder, this close,

almost certainly to kill someone.

And the thought occurred to me,

I wonder whether it was a mine that was primed

but had not yet had explosive in.

- Seymour's mine may have been primed

with the chemical initiating substances

but not charged with gunpowder,

an oversight by the Russians,

(mine exploding)

a lucky escape for the British Admiral and his men.

Up next, the secret of Captain Bligh's bullet.

(dramatic music)

The National Maritime museum is full of grand objects

with towering stories to tell

but sometimes it's the smallest and simplest objects

that tell the most epic stories.

- These three objects belonged to Captain William Bligh

who is, of course, famous as the captain of the Bounty,

the ship involved in that infamous mutiny in 1789.

- [Narrator] On the night of April 28th, 1789

the crew of HMS Bounty mutinied against their iron willed

and controlling captain, William Bligh.

- And then an oar, Mr Christian!

- [Narrator] They seized the ship and set Bligh adrift

in an open boat along with 18 loyal followers.

Bligh and his men were faced with a treacherous

open boat voyage across the South Pacific.

- 47 days is an extraordinarily long time.

Over 3600 miles.

His men faced hunger, they faced thirst,

they faced towering waves, they faced storms,

they faced rain and then they faced

the real problem of all open boat survivors,

they had to cope with each other as well.

- Being sat in a tiny boat in a massive ocean

that's in storm conditions is absolutely terrifying.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] Chris Martin is a long distance rower

who has crossed both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans

in boats the same size as Bligh's.

- 19 men in a boat the same size as ours,

no cabin, no watertight compartment

to go and hide in when the weather gets rough.

I can't imagine what that would be like.

(indistinct shouting)

- [Narrator] So how did Bligh deliver his men to safety?

With the help of a musket ball,

a coconut shell and a horn beaker.

This is our museum secret.

(boat engine humming)

The investigation begins in Portsmouth.

To understand Bligh's ordeal

we must first get aboard his boat.

- This is the Blue Launch.

She's a replica of frigate's launch from the period.

So she's exactly the same size as the boat

that Bligh would've been put in, that's 23 feet.

She would've been used for shipping crew

and stores to and from a ship

so she's certainly not designed for a voyage

of any significant length

and certainly not for a lot of people.

So I think the first thing we need to do

is see what it looks like with 19 men on board.

Come on then boys, let's get on!

On you go first.

That's one, two, three, four, five.

OK, number 17 and our own Captain Bligh, number 18

and we know there were 19 people on board

so I'm gonna get on as well.

It's starting to look and feel pretty cramped already.

You can feel us settling down quite low to the water

and the idea of going on a 3600 mile voyage in this

is pretty horrific.

- Give way together.

- The problem we've got is space.

We've got the mast here and boom

and the bowsprit here for the rigging.

So the poor people in the middle

keep getting poked in the ribs by the oars

so for them it's quite uncomfortable.

(seagulls cawing)

- [Narrator] The flat waters of Portsmouth harbor

are nothing compared to the giant swells of the Pacific.

- We saw some really crazy weather conditions

out in the Pacific, some 60 foot high waves,

really aggressive storms blowing past.

- One of the problems, of course, is shipping water

from seas coming along, the swell breaking

over the side of the boat and we know

that at one stage in his voyage Bligh had to have

two men constantly bailing, 24 hours a day.

- [Narrator] And in an open boat the threats

come from both the sea and the sun.

- In the Pacific the ozone layer is quite thin

so the crew will have been exposed to extreme temperatures

during the day and an extreme risk of heatstroke.

Now this would have had various effects

on them in the form of hyperthermia.

These will have included things like dizziness,

confusion, nausea and vomiting

and just a general state of unease and agitation.

- [Narrator] And adding to their agitation

was their pitiful food supply.

So this is what Bligh was given to take with him.

We've got 150 pounds of biscuits,

28 gallons of water, 20 pounds of salted pork,

six coconuts, three bottles of red wine,

five quarts of rum and that was it.

That was what they had to survive 47 days at sea.

- [Narrator] This works out to 400 calories a day, per man.

- [Sam] So can I have every person....

- [Narrator] On his Pacific row in 2009

Chris budgeted 5000 calories a day

but after four months he discovered

that some of his food had become contaminated with seawater.

- As the food ran out and became more contaminated

we then had to eat less and less.

At the end, our last day, we had 200 calories of food.

It's absolutely exhausting to be putting

that much effort in to physical exertion

and not getting any food in to replace those lost calories.

- [Narrator] Bligh and his men tried

to supplement their supplies by stopping off

on the island of Tonga but they were quickly

beaten off the island by the locals.

One of the crewmen was stoned to death in the escape.

Fearing further casualties, Bligh knew

he had to control his men from turning on each other.

And this brings us back to the musket ball

which holds the secret to their survival,

serving not as a weapon but as a weight.

- So, knowing the weight of the musket ball,

Bligh was able to use this to measure out the bread ration

that each man would receive twice a day.

- [Narrator] The musket ball weighs less than an ounce.

- So what we imagine is that Bligh

would use a makeshift weighing scales,

probably using coconut shells, similar to this,

the bullet in one and the meager bread ration in the other.

What they would do is to make up

a terribly weak stew, perhaps of some shellfish

or the tiny amount of dried pork that they've got on.

They would mash their bread into it

and add a little bit of seawater just to act as a sauce.

So it is little wonder that Bligh

writes around the rim of his cup,

"This is the cup I eat my miserable ration out of."

This is not cordon bleu cookery on the open waves.

- [Narrator] Battling dehydration,

Bligh also controlled the fresh water,

giving his men an eighth of a pint,

rationed from this beaker, three times a day.

This way their only food and drink for over a month.

47 days after they were kicked

off the Bounty by it's mutineering crew,

Bligh and 17 of his men reached the British colony of Timor.

So how did Bligh manage to keep control of his crew

under such extreme circumstances?

- He's managed it by his seamanship,

he managed it by his leadership.

He kept everyone together and there are so many accounts

of survivors in open boats absolutely falling apart

in situations like this.

- I think that the main reason that the crew survived

was because of the discipline of Captain Bligh in rationing

out the food and water so carefully.

I think without that they probably won't have survived.

- [Narrator] It was Bligh's obsessive, controlling

personality that turned his ship's crew to mutiny

but in the end it was this same tough discipline

that saved them all from certain death.

Up next, the secret of fighting pirates.

(dramatic music)

Britain's National Maritime Museum

is filled with reminders of naval conflicts.

From the American revolutionary war to the Second World War.

But one war would outlast them all.

It began centuries ago and remarkably,

it's still going on today.

- This is a presentation sword that was awarded

to Lieutenant Robert Gore of the gunboat Andromache

and it was awarded to him in 1837

for action against the pirates in the Malacca Straits.

- [Narrator] By the 1830s the Straits of Malacca,

a major trading route between India and China,

had become a notorious hotspot for pirates.

Robert Gore was part of a Royal Navy taskforce

created to eradicate this menace.

- Man the guns!

(cannons firing)

- [Narrator] The word pirates most often brings to mind

images of swashbuckling villains from centuries past

but the truth is pirates are still very much with us.

In the past few years Somali pirates have hijacked

hundreds of ships from sail boats and fishing trawlers,

to 1000 foot long super tankers.

(machine gun firing)

Piracy is as lucrative and serious

a threat today as it ever was.

(ominous music) (coins tinkling)

So how do you wage war on piracy?

This is our museum secret.

The investigation begins on the waters of the Gair Loch

in Scotland, home to her majesties naval base, Clyde.

These Royal Marines are the latest in a long tradition

of Royal Navy counter piracy task forces.

- [Man] Go, clear!

- The intelligence picture so far,

they've seen four crew members on the upper deck.

No weapons have been sighted,

brief your orders Rob, at 10:00.

Any other issues, we'll update you on the...

- [Narrator] Captain Chris Vigors is the second in command

of S Squadron 43 Commando Fleet Protection Services.

His men are training for deployment to the Gulf of Aden

where their job is to combat today's pirates.

(boat roaring)

(hose spraying)

His squadron is performing an exercise

in chasing and boarding a suspected pirate vessel.

- Right, get back.

- [Man] No hands low!

- Put it down!

- [In Unison] No hands low!

- A few years ago they used to just work

very close to their coast.

They didn't really have the vessels to go out there

but since then piracy has increased

and they've now got big mother ships

which are capable of doing long distances.

(cannons firing)

- [Narrator] In the 19th century

the best way to evade pirates was to out run them

but no ship could sail at full speed all the time.

19th century pirates knew this and would patiently wait

for the right opportunity to strike.

- They would wait until the ship was becalmed

or maybe even temporarily run aground

and then they would dart out from cover,

from hiding in their proas and cluster

around the bow and the stern of the ship.

(oars splashing)

- [Narrator] Being overtaken by pirates

pretty much always meant death.

- When they captured a ship they either killed the crew

or held them prisoner but if there was any sign

of resistance in no uncertain terms

they made it very clear that they would just carve

everyone up and throw them overboard.

- [Narrator] By the 1830s piracy was causing

such a disruption to trade in the Straits of Malacca

that the Royal Navy were called in

to eradicate pirates from the area.

Among the officers was Robert Gore.

- The gun boat on which Robert Gore was serving,

in the course of six months, from May to September,

burnt down three so-called pirate villages,

killed upwards of 200 pirates

and they lost only one man and 17 wounded.

(intense music)

- [Narrator] Today many modern pirates use captured tankers

or cargo vessels as their home base.

This presents new challenges

for Chris Vigors and S Squadron.

- We use flashbangs.

(flashbangs exploding)

Basically that's just a big shock for the entry.

(flashbangs exploding)

So they'll throw a flashbang in which has six loud bangs

which just takes the enemies mind off anything

that we might be doing or shocks them a little.

- [Narrator] For vulnerable ships on the high seas

the same rules apply today that have held for centuries.

If you can't outrun the pirates,

and you can't cut them off at their source,

then you have only two options left.

- Tryna prevent them from boarding you

and obviously fighting back if they come against you.

If you fire any shots at them,

they'll normally just turn and run.

- [Narrator] And if that fails, then just hope

that there's a counter piracy unit working in your area.

After all, they've got centuries of experience behind them.

- [Man] Get down!

- [Man] Get down, get down!

Next on museum secrets, the secret

to controlling a million volts of lightning.

(lightning zapping)

(dramatic music)

The tall ships designed for trade, war and exploration

faced many dangers from both sea and land

but with main masts reaching as high as 60 meters

they also faced a threat from the sky.

- This is one of the mast heads

of the great French flagship, the L'Orient

that was destroyed by British warships

at the battle of the Nile in August 1798.

At the top you can see a lightning rod

that would've conducted a bolt of lightning

right the way down the mast,

down through the hull of the ship, to the keel,

which was several hundred feet below

and then the charge would disperse into the ocean.

(shelf sliding)

- [Narrator] The L'Orient was Napoleon's flagship

during the French invasion of Egypt.

His fleet was confronted one night

by Britain's Admiral Nelson.

This painting depicts the climax of the battle

when the L'Orient caught fire.

- There was a colossal explosion

which sent a gout of flame high up into the air

and also carried chunks of the ship

and pieces of wreckage right up into the heavens as well.

- [Narrator] This rod was one of the only remnants

of the ship to survive the explosion.

It was fished out of the water

and presented to Admiral Nelson.

- We know that Nelson was very fond of this object.

His house was completely full of artifacts

from battles; it was full of portraits of himself.

It was full of paintings of battles

but he kept his lightning conductor by the front door.

It was the first thing that you'd see.

Now, because it looks curious,

I think it was a conversation starter.

People said, "what is that, why have you got it?"

- [Narrator] And the conversation

continues among scientists today.

- I've never seen one which is so blunt.

I can't see there's any reason

that could've happened in an accident,

it looks like somebody has bent it in that fashion.

Maybe they had a good reason for it; I don't know.

- [Narrator] Modern lightning rods are sharper

so just how effective was this unusually shaped antique one?

That is our museum secret.

(lift whirring) (light clicking)

Our investigation begins at the University

of Manchester's high voltage lab.

- Lightning is likely to hit anything

that's tall and anything that's sharp.

So if you have, say, a tree, if you have yourself

holding an umbrella, if you have a tall building,

(lightning crackling)

all of those things could be hit.

- [Narrator] The electrical field around tall

and sharp objects is intensified

and attracts lightning strikes,

including, of course, a mast at sea.

- Lightning can be 200,000 amps

which is a huge amount of current.

It's about the same as 20,000 electric kettles.

It's only there for a very very short time

but it can blow things apart and cause massive damage.

- [Narrator] And for the wooden ships

of Nelson's era the threat was even worse.

- There's obviously a huge problem with warships

because they were made of wood

but also because they were full of gunpowder.

If you think about HMS Victory

when she was first commissioned in the 1770s

she had 42,000 pounds of gunpowder on her

which is the equivalent to 25 and a half tonnes of TNT.

Now that gets a bit messy if you get struck by lightning.

- [Narrator] In 1752 the experiments

of American inventor Benjamin Franklin

proved that a sharp, pointed rod

could be used to attract lightning

but 50 years after Franklin's experiment

the French were still using their own blunt tipped design

which brings us back to our museum secret.

How did the blunt lightning rod

compare to the sharp lightning rod?

Today Ian will test this for the first time.

This generator will send 1.1 million volts

to a hanging electrode, which represents a cloud.

Ian is placing the rods at an equal distance from the cloud.

- I think what will happen is we'll see

that the sharp lightning rod attracts more lightning

than the blunt one and I think we'll show

that the French were probably wrong

but they didn't have the knowledge that we have today,

that the sharp lightning rod intensifies

this electric field around the tip.

(door closing)

(lightning crashing)

- [Narrator] That's two strikes to the blunt rod.

The rods are swapped around to make sure the test is fair.

(lightning crashing)

And one strike to the sharp rod.

Ian is surprised by the results.

(lightning crashing)

- And the blunt one again.

Before the tests I would've assumed

that every single lightning strike we saw

would've gone to this rod compared with this rod

where there's no real sharpness to it

but obviously this one must work

(lightning crashing)

otherwise you wouldn't see the results

that we just saw in the lab.

- [Narrator] So the French were onto something

with their unconventional design but one question remains,

why was Nelson so fond of this particular piece?

- Nelson may have appreciated that lightning conductor

because it was a reminder of the shockingly violent

and merciless assault that he launched on the French

at the Battle of the Nile in 1798.

You see they had this piece of maritime technology

which would protect them from nature's wrath

but they didn't have anything

to protect them from the British.

(canons firing) (boats crashing)

- [Narrator] Up next, a harrowing secret

of the Franklin expedition, frozen in ice.

(dramatic music)

The National Maritime Museum is home to many artifacts

celebrating Britain's greatest maritime explorations

but in the 19th century there was one region

that the British Navy hadn't charted.

The Arctic.

Determined to discover the elusive northwest passage

through the Arctic, the British Admiral team

mount their most well equipped expedition to date.

The ships are outfitted with steam engines,

water filtration systems, extensive libraries

and a recent invention, food preserved in tins.

They appoint this man to lead the expedition,

Sir John Franklin.

- Franklin was an Arctic veteran.

He was a survivor.

He was someone who had been entrusted with leadership

on two separate Arctic expeditions in the past

and he was famously an explorer who had eaten

his own boots to survive and this is a testament

to his skills in surviving, his skills

in getting a job done and in coming back safely.

- [Narrator] But Franklin doesn't come back safely.

He and his 128 men disappear into the Arctic abyss.

After three years with no word from the expedition

Britain launches the largest manhunt in history.

Finding Franklin becomes a national obsession.

Desperate to cover the vast Arctic expanses

in their search, the Victorians are inspired

by a popular means of travel at the time, the balloon.

- This is a communication balloon

and it's made from animal gut and paper,

kind of patchwork-ed together.

It's stained with what we think is blackberry juice

to make it very visible against the Arctic landscape.

- [Narrator] Released from rescue vessels,

these hydrogen balloons carried hundreds of messages

on burning fuses, scattering them over a wide area.

- These are messages of hope, these are messages

telling them that there are people out there

looking for them, that there are provisions there for them,

that there is hope of survival.

- [Narrator] The Victorians dreamed up

other creative ways for distributing these messages of hope.

These collars were stamped with the coordinates

of rescue parties and attached to Arctic foxes

in the hope that Franklin's men would discover them.

- We also have examples of badges

which would be given to Inuit men

who traveled through the Arctic

and these badges contained details of the exact location

where Franklin's men could find rescue.

- [Narrator] But every attempt to make contact

with the expedition is met with absolute silence.

What happened to Franklin and his men?

This is our museum secret.

A clue is discovered five years

into the search with the discovery

of Franklin's first camp on Beechey Island.

- There was a coal pile, there was a tin can dump

and there were three graves and these were really

the first pieces of evidence of the expedition

and also the first sign that things

had gone terribly awry very early on in the expedition.

- [Narrator] More clues to the expedition's trail

surfaced farther south on King William Island.

Here, Inuit natives are discovered carrying buttons

and other objects from the expedition.

The Inuit claimed to have acquired the objects

from a large group of white men.

Motivated by the Inuit testimony

the British send out one last search party in 1859.

They strike gold.

A can with a report inside filled out

by one of Franklin's officers two years into the expedition.

- The form was filled out saying that everything

was going well on the expedition up until May 1847

and then squeezed around the edge

in tiny, desperate handwriting is the tale

that John Franklin had died and that the men

that were remaining, stuck in the ice

decided to head southwards for the Fish River

to see if they could find provisions to help.

- [Narrator] And so Britain had her answer.

Franklin was dead.

The fate of the rest of his men was a mystery,

lost in the ice.

The search was called off.

But great mysteries never die and in the 1980s

Canadian forensic anthropologist Owen Beattie

resurrected the old obsession, relocating the human remains.

- I don't think he was prepared

for what he encountered on Beech Island

which was a level of preservation that as astonishing.

It looked like these men had just died.

The men had died of pneumonia and their tissue

and bone showed dramatically high levels

of lead poisoning which brings us back

to that recent invention, canned food.

- I've held some of those tin cans

and the lead is on the inside of the seams

and it drips like candle wax.

- [Narrator] After three years of consuming

the lead poisoned food Franklin's men

would've been in terrible mental and physical shape.

Desperate to seek food and rescue,

the men left their ships and headed south.

Owen Beattie followed the men's trail on King William Island

and here he made a grisly discovery.

- That's where a tent circle was located

and around the outside of that tent circle

was a scatter of human remains.

- [Narrator] Among the remains were a smashed in skull

and a femur with unusual cut marks.

- They were marks that had been cut using a metal knife

and they're really evidence of de-fleshing.

They're butcher marks.

So whoever was doing this was literally cutting off

the muscle, trying to get access to the flesh.

The skull was smashed in, there were fracture lines

and so the teeth and the face were missing.

So clearly there was an effort to access the brain,

likely as a food source.

- [Narrator] But the skeleton wasn't complete.

It appeared that the bones of the heavier

part of the body, the torso, had been left somewhere else.

- The portable parts, the easily portable parts

of the body, the legs, the arms and the skull,

were carried along almost like takeaway food,

to put it crudely and these surviving crewmen

then reached this point, built the camp and had a meal.

- [Narrator] The fate of the Franklin expedition

marked the end of Britain's great legacy

of conquest over the seas.

The Arctic had become the last

and most unforgiving frontier.

In this place where Empire and exploration meet,

for every mystery we reveal, far more must remain unspoken.

Tales of high seas triumph and ice bound tragedy.

Secrets hidden in plain sight

inside the National Maritime Museum.

(dramatic music)