The Rest of History

The Wrong Corpse That Built the British Empire: How a Botched Burial Gave England Its Navy

Episode Summary

In 1628, a Dutch ship called the Vasa sank on its maiden voyage — but that's not our story. Our story is about the 17th-century salvage obsession it inspired, the forgotten Swedish engineer who accidentally cracked underwater engineering, and how his stolen notebooks ended up in the hands of Samuel Pepys, the mild-mannered naval clerk who quietly redesigned the British Royal Navy from a cocktail party.