Ghosts, gods & sea monsters: a supernatural history of the Atlantic

Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. For centuries, sailors crossing the Atlantic believed that they were not alone. Rather, they were haunted by ghost ships, watched by mermaids and Dalked by sea monsters. In this episode, historian Carl Bell talks to John Borcombe about the supernatural stories that dominated the maritime imagination and explores what role these fishy tales might play in our understanding of the ocean today.

Carl, we're here to talk about your new book, The Perilous Deep: A Supernatural History of the Atlantic. To kick things off, what do we mean by that subtitle? How can an ocean be considered supernatural? There's two things there, I think. One is that there are histories of the Atlantic that kind of take priority over others.

And we're very familiar with certain histories of exploration, of economics, of trade. I guess I would refer to them as sort of the mundane type histories. But then coexisting with that are the cultures that developed around those seafarers and the trading sort of routes. that we're very rich in terms of supernatural stories, this kind of maritime folklore. And that's what I wanted to explore.

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