Matthew Sillence: Peter, good afternoon. Peter, welcome to

here PGR matters in the studio. It's fantastic to have you here

today. I know that you've already been quite busy with

supervisory meetings today as well. So very grateful for your

time and also for sending over some fascinating information

about your project. I normally start these conversations just

by asking a little bit about our guests, what we tend to call the

academic origin story. So where you've come from academically,

what kind of courses you've you've come come from, whether

you came straight into a research degree. So do you want

to tell listeners a little bit about about your experience

where you you know, where you came into your current research

degree?

Peter Wells: Well, of course. And thank you for asking me on

the program. It's very nice to be here. I think, like a lot of

people doing PhDs, certainly in this day and age, I've had quite

a lot of life experience, as they call it, before coming

here. I certainly didn't come straight out of university. And

in fact, my background is quite unrelated in that I have a

career in music, both as a performer and, more latterly, as

a music examiner, but my interest that brought me to this

project was really my interest in Maps, which is of long

standing. When I was a child, I had a beach, or my parents had a

beach house, and I used to buy Hydrographic Office maps that

was in New Zealand where I was born, and plot out imaginary

voyages around the coastlines near their beach house. And I've

still got those maps. And more latterly, I ended up buying

antique maps of which I now have all sorts of things, and they

are fascinating. So historic maps really brought me into this

sort of thing, and I thought they were so interesting that I

did an MA in History of Art looking at maps as artistic

objects. And that's not necessarily the way people

normally look at mapping. They think of cartography and

geography waters out there. This was looking more at how they

were perceived as decorative items, as a printed matter on a

page. And when I was doing that, I was focusing on a particular

atlas by this chap called Greenvile Collins, who was a

late 17th century naval officer. And It rapidly became apparent

that there was a great deal more to him than was really

available, just in the one Atlas that he produced. He did a lot

of very interesting things at a very interesting time. The Navy

in the late 17th century was a major British institution, the

biggest institution in the country, as far as expense was

concerned. So that made me think there's a lot more to this, and

I'd like to actually find out about this guy's life and work

and what impact that had on the development of maps as the type

of things that I'd been buying and would continue to buy from a

later period. So looking around for where I might do some

research. And that sort of thing I happened on UEA, which is

comparatively near to home, excellent.

Matthew Sillence: Well, I mean, we're not, we're not far from

the coast here. And the the coast, the coastline features

fairly prominently, actually. I mean, you turn your views on,

and we're talking about coastal erosion. We think about the kind

of the, I guess, the, you know, the place of East Anglia as a,

as a, it's a coastal community in many ways. We've got very

we've got a huge number of villages. We've got these major

towns, ports along the eastern side of the country, many of

those, in many of those places, I guess their fortunes have

changed over the years, or their industries have changed

Peter Wells: over the years. Broadly enough. I was actually

just this morning looking at one of Collins's drawings of coastal

views, which are useful for navigation. And you say that the

futures of these villages have changed, and in many cases, they

particularly have, because in his Atlas printed in 1693 he had

a nice little view of the town of Dunwich. Now, you can go out

on the North Sea all you like now, but you're not going to see

that view, because there is no town of Dunwich there. It's all

gone, and yet there's only 300 and whatever, years ago. But he

still could draw a view of the town of Dunwich, but it shows

those whole East Anglian coasts as dynamic environments. The

coast was very important to Collins. There's research going

on here at UEA about the sinking of the Gloucester which ran

aground on sandbanks off the East Anglian coast in 1682 the

same period as this guy was doing. As mapping work and those

feature, those features become important in the work of

mapping. When you have a situation where the landscape or

the seascape is constantly changing, your map is almost out

of date the moment you printed it, what do you then do? And it

makes it a very interesting study about how you can interact

with what is supposed to be a record of an environment when

that environment is endlessly shifting.

Matthew Sillence: So Collins is best known for his atlas, 'Great

Britain's Coasting Pilot'. Can you explain the significance of

this work and how, I guess, how it contributed to the

professionalization of this the well, the term you use, I in

your research proposals, which you very kindly sent through, is

this, this idea of naval hydrography. So maybe if we

start with naval hydrography.

Peter Wells: Well, the naval part doesn't really matter. The

hydrography part is really just a nice term that means watery

maps. Cartography is the mapping of the land. Hydrography is

simply the mapping of the water. Now, of course, you can't map

water, but what you can map is what is underneath the water. So

if you go out and make a map outside the studio here, we can

look at across the broad we can see where the right the rises of

the land are, where there are the depressions. We can make a

map of that. It's all visible. You go out on the sea and you

want to know what's likely to hit the bottom of your boat, but

you can't see it because it's all hidden by water. That's what

hydrography is. It's the blind measurement of land you can't

see because it's underwater. That's really all that mattered.

Now, in the 17th century, this was very much in its infancy,

and as far as maps of the British coast were concerned,

they were all mostly, anyway, made by the Dutch. Now that's

fine. The Dutch were in a very prosperous period in the 17th

century, their golden age. They were clever. They made nice

maps. The trouble is, we spent most of the 17th century at war

with them, and having to use maps of your own coastline that

are made by your enemy. Can cause some complexities. So in

the middle of the 17th century, the King Charles the second

decided that it was really about time that we had some maps of

the British Coast made by British people. So he

commissioned Greenvile Collins in 1681 to conduct a complete

survey of the entire British coast, which this captain, being

a brave chap, said, Yes, of course, I can do that. It'll

take seven years, which even then, seven years is remarkably

short time to map. I don't know what the actual length of the

British coasters, but it's some 1000s of miles. And so he set

out in 1681 to chart the entire coastline of Britain. Now he had

a number of problems with this. The surveying season when you're

out on the sea is basically the same as the summer, so

notoriously short that cuts half the year out. For starters,

you've also got to have somebody pay for it. And everybody knows

that Charles the second was always short of money, largely

because he spent too much of it on his mistresses and on war. So

getting money to pay for it was always a challenge, and he had

no really accurate map of the land to work from. So if you get

to map the sea side of the coast, you want to at least know

what the land side of the coast looks like. And Collins had a

tremendous problem with that. He worked quite closely with Samuel

Pepys, who was not only a famous diarist, but was very high up in

the administration of the Navy was the equivalent of a sort of

government defense minister today. And Collins once said to

Samuel Pepys that, in his view, the coasts of Britain were

better actually mapped by a chap called John Speed about 100

years earlier than they were in in their modern maps of the

time, so he had a lot of work to do.

Matthew Sillence: Yeah. It's fascinating that you've got

these many people looking back very long periods of time to get

reliable examples. And I'm just wondering what seems to be the

cause of that was, were there just very big gaps in the in the

historical record, of the cartographic record, or were the

maps that were being produced in some ways insufficient in that

time period that they would they didn't show the detail.

Peter Wells: It's not necessarily that they were

insufficient. It's there were two main reasons why maps tended

to be used for far too long. They took an awfully long time.

To make, as I just said, because this was all done by hand. No

satellites. There was no sort of proper theodolite. You were

working with very basic materials. And the other problem

with them was that most maps were not produced by government

agencies, as they would be now. There was no equivalent for the

UK Hydrographic Office or the Ordnance Survey. These things

hadn't yet been set up. So maps were produced by private map

makers, publishers, engravers, and their objective wasn't

really whether the map was good, but whether it would sell. So if

you've got a product that's selling perfectly well, you keep

selling it, there's no incentive to make it new or better. And in

fact, Collins atlas, 'Great Britain's Coasting Pilot' was

published in 1693 but the last issue of it was actually

produced in 1792. That's quite a long run. 99 years of a run.

Now, we were just talking earlier about how the the East

Anglian Coast changes all the time. And most coasts change to

some extent. And certainly in 100 years, you know how, how

good is your map going to be? But people were still buying it,

so the chart makers would still sell it.

Matthew Sillence: Fascinating. So what with, with the biography

that you're, you're working on with, with Collins, what, what

are some of the major challenges that he faced during his career?

Obviously, he's got this very big undertaking. He's got this

seven year period to work on this, you know, this, this,

this, this coastal survey. Politically, financially, it's a

tricky period in British history, from what I know of it,

how did he navigate that? Forgive the pun, I suppose.

Peter Wells: How did he navigate it? Very good. Well, actually,

he was really quite clever in this there were a number of

interesting points you raised there. It was a tricky period in

British history. We'd done away with the king only 50 years

before Charles the First got his head cut off in 1688, just a few

years before Collins produced his atlas, we did away with the

king again. James the Second got booted out. Charles the Second,

as I said before, was always short of money, and spent much

of the time sort of secretly borrowing it from the French. So

there were a lot of problems. Politically. There was

instability. The economy was not anything to write home about.

England was not a major power in European terms. The Dutch were

much wealthier. The French were much wealthier because they were

bigger. We were a bit of a sorry state, but we did also have some

advantages, one of which was a quite free intellectual

environment. The same period in the 1660s was when the Royal

Society was founded. Just after the restoration. Isaac Newton

was doing his stuff about gravity. Samuel Pepys was doing

his interesting things in all sorts of fields. People like

Robert Hooke were conducting scientific experiments. There

was a lot of intellectual freedom, and Collins rather

tapped into a lot of that. He had a great interest in things.

He wrote several journals which he was required to for his job,

but in them, he fills up pages and pages with notes on his

observations of places he went, things he saw. So he had an

intellectual curiosity, and that helped him navigate a lot of

these challenges. The main challenge that was always faced,

as I said earlier, was money. It costs a lot. Even when you're a

one boat operation, you've still got to feed the people on that

boat. You've still got to repair the boat after the winter

storms. You've still got to actually have horses for

surveying the land side. There are a lot of a lot of

expenditure issues, and money was his constant problem. And

this comes up in the archival material all the time, endless

please to be paid what he was promised. And that's a problem.

There was also the the constant possibility of war. Yes, you

know, we're already fought three wars with the Dutch in the 1640s

50s and 60s, there was always the possibility of another. They

were our great maritime trading rival. So they expected to own

the same seas that we expected to own. The French were always

planning to invade England, or at least looking like they were.

This, again, made things in gave an instability to the general

nature of his work. And he was also working with, as I said

earlier, very, very basic gear. So there were a lot of

challenges. He had not enough time. He was trying to survey

the entire coast in a few years. That doesn't work. At that. So a

lot of it was sketchy. He had not enough people, only 20 on

his boat. Now that's not very many when half of them are

required to actually sail the boat. So there were a lot of

these problems, and yet what he produced was still elegant,

attractive, modern for the time, certainly a vast improvement on

the old Dutch maps from the late 16th century, which were not

scientific in any way. They were just pictures, really. So what

he actually achieved was remarkable given the constraints

he faced.

Matthew Sillence: So Peter, you mentioned a little bit there

about the journals. So Collins is producing these observations

of places, presumably, you know, events, people, things that are

happening. Can you share a few insights into your research

process? So we're actually working with the original texts.

Have you found anything particularly striking, as

anything sort of jumps out at you that people haven't, haven't

really looked at before, or maybe a different, a different

take on what's already known? Yes.

Peter Wells: I mean, there are all sorts of interesting things

come out of the journals. Collins was an interesting chap

from an archival point of view, because he wasn't necessarily

terribly important. He wasn't commanding a fleet. He wasn't in

command of a great warship. He was a mid ranking officer, but

all officers of the Navy were required to keep records. They

still are, and it was another invention, really, of Samuel

Pepys, when he was Secretary to the Admiralty, he said all

lieutenants, captains and masters which are navigating

officers, and that's what Collins was, must keep a journal

of their voyages and then present it to the Admiralty for

appraisal afterwards. And we'll see what interesting things are

recorded that we can use. But Collins went further than that,

because he was intellectually inquisitive and he was also

quite well educated. We don't know a great deal about his his

education, but his father went to Oxford, his son went to

Oxford. So he came from a sort of intellectual environment, and

he was educated in the classics. So when he went, for example,

around the Mediterranean in the late 1670s he filled his journal

with pages of descriptions of places like Naples. Now, a lot

of what he recorded was the sort of thing you'd expect. How many

troops the king of Spain keeps there, what the size of the

castles around the harbor is but he had also talked about the

fashions, the food, the wine. And he went around the

Mediterranean for four years in the 1670s on a number of

vessels. Making these sort of observations, he recorded the

first record in English of the great Malaga earthquake of 1679,

he arrived only about three or four days after the earthquake

had destroyed much of Andalusia. He went to what were the ruins

of Troy at the other end of the Mediterranean and recorded notes

on whether they were Troy or whether they were something that

came after Troy. So he did have a lot of these sort of matters

of interest, and what he also records frequently is something

that's a little bit unexpected, how healthy they all were. It'll

be interesting that people who go off to sea in a sailing boat

all get scurvy and spend their time picking the weevils out of

biscuits. And it wasn't like that, and that I did find was

rather surprising. In 1680 Collins went to the

Mediterranean in a boat called the leopard. Now it was slightly

more important, because amongst the people aboard, they had one

of the illegitimate sons of Charles, the second, the Duke of

Grafton, who was about 15 at the time, and was being trained for

the sea. He was going to be made an admiral. So maybe things were

a little better. But it's remarkable how often they record

stopping and filling up with fresh provisions, fresh

vegetables, fresh fruit. It's surprising to find that things

like the dreaded scurvy read any account of 18th century

explorations in the South Pacific, for example. And we

always think Captain Cook in the 60, 1760s sort of found the cure

for scurvy. But it was well known they would take on limes

and citruses in the Mediterranean ports because they

knew that kept the crew healthy, and this was 100 years before

cook. Now I wouldn't have expected that to be the case.

I'm slightly surprised to find this stuff coming out of the

archives.

Matthew Sillence: It reminds me of a while you were talking

there a quote that you mention in relation to your to your

project, which was, I. Uh, apparently from the Duke of

Buckingham in 1672 he's reported to have said the undoubted

interest of England is trade, since it's only that which can

make us either rich or safe. We started out talking about war to

talk about conflict between nations, but it sounds as though

Collins was was picking up on what's available through

different markets, what's along along the coast. So what what's

come out of that in relation to trade? Then?

Peter Wells: Well, another thing that was particularly

interesting about this whole period, from a naval

perspective, is that although we were at war with the Dutch in

the first, second, third, Dutch wars, the French were always

just lurking below the horizon. From 1674 there was actually

quite a long period of peace, and this was the period when

Collins was doing most of his work. Now maybe that's because

there was more peace. There's a threat of war, yes, but they

weren't actively engaged in it. But what it does mean is that

when you get peace, you don't need such a big navy. Navy is

expensive, so the problem for a lot of officers after 1674 was

that they weren't really needed. So part of Collins's mapping

project was also a way of providing himself with

opportunities to stay in employment, he was quite canny

in that regard, but also when he was doing these trips around to

the Mediterranean. And again, this comes out all the time. In

his journals, he says things like, No, we set sail and we

sailed to Cadiz, and there we found and he lists six British

warships convoying 38 merchantmen for England. And

then he goes off somewhere else. We we arrived in the port of

Livorno in Italy. And there we found and he lists another eight

British warships, convoying 15 ships to Smyrna or Scanderoon,

or whatever. And that the thing that comes out of all this is

that throughout the 1670s and into the 1680s most British

naval activity was actually convoy protection of merchant

ships trading in the Mediterranean. And we often

think of the sort of Stuart period as one in which the

colonies were starting to come out. You know, there were

colonies and in America, the early explorations of places

like Australia were starting to happen. William Dampier and so

on, in the 1680s first man to reach Australia. So we tend to

think that those overseas sort of seeds of empire were the

important thing that was going on. But it wasn't trade with the

Mediterranean was absolutely central to British prosperity,

and most of the time, the Navy was busy shuttling back and

forth, which is why officers like Collins enjoyed it so much,

probably all the way right up to the far end of the Mediterranean

at places like Smyrna, which was a major port. And of course, a

merchant ship convoy could carry a lot more trade than a camel

train. So if the rich produce of the Orient all arrived in the

eastern end of the Mediterranean, it was much

easier to bunk it on a ship, bypassing places like Venice

that used to keep a stranglehold on these sort of luxury goods

trades, and take it straight back to Britain. And that's not

really something that we tend to think was was important, but it

was hugely significant.

Matthew Sillence: It sounds as though Collins is is a kind of,

maybe not the heart of, but it is very well plugged into these

networks of influential, oh yes, people, writers, intellectuals,

you mentioned the Royal Society earlier, what just as a sort of

extension of that developing that point. Do you? Do you think

there's some value in understanding these networks

better through Collins. Obviously, this is a period

other people have written about the, you know, we've had a lot

of people write about Samuel Pepys and many other figures,

and also the kind of scientific revolution, I suppose, in terms

of the development of,

Peter Wells: Well, it's amazing how much crossover there was

between them. You know, naval officers were frequently

interested in science. They were frequently interested in the

arts. Artistic people were often interested in the sciences. So

as I said earlier, it was a very active intellectual environment.

London was a major center for a lot of this sort of intellectual

endeavor. In the late 17th century, the Royal Society was

certainly a central part of that, but it wasn't the only

part that was the foundation of things like Greshem College,

which is still going. It was a sort of attempt to found a

university in London that never quite became a university, but

it employed professors to give lectures, and it still does,

even in today's dates. Yeah, so Collins was very much plugged in

to these sort of networks. And you mentioned that Pepys was

like this, and peeps knew all sorts of people, but peeps had a

slightly higher social status. He was cousin of the Earl of

Sandwich, and he did actually have some sort of wealth behind

him. Collins was of a rather lower status, I suppose you

could say, and yet he's still associated with people like

figures in the Royal Society. He had very interesting experience

mapping a cave in Bristol, and the results of this cave mapping

exercise were published by Sir Robert Southwell in the

'Transactions of the Royal Society' with Collins's name and

there and as the explorer and so on, and this turns out to be the

first survey of a natural cave ever published. Wow, these sort

of things do come out of the woodwork was surprising

frequency that it's not something you'd expect at all,

and yet, there was this range of activities that people were were

engaged in and were interested in. It might have just been that

the pace of life was a little slower than we do now. We're all

specialists in some minute field of endeavor. The idea of a broad

understanding, a broad concept of knowledge, isn't quite as

valued perhaps now as it might have been. Then.

Matthew Sillence: What's interesting you're starting to

talk about, I guess, how we think about the nature of

knowledge epistemology today. How do you see the impact of

Collins's work on modern hydrography? So hydrography,

that's a very different thing. So yeah, modern high

hydrogography. So what?

Peter Wells: Oddly enough, I don't really think there was

very much influence on it. Collins was a seminal feature

figure. He started things going as far as maps and hydrography

are concerned. When he published his atlas in 1693 the British

more or less said, Oh, we've got a nice atlas. Now that's all we

need to do, and they didn't bother doing anything else.

Meanwhile, the French were busy having their French

Enlightenment and doing things in a very complicated French

way, but they stole the march on us, and throughout the 18th

century, cartography and hydrography were basically

dominated by the French. They founded the Depot de la Marine,

the French equivalent of the Hydrographic Office. In the

middle of the 18th century. I can't remember the date 1760

something. We founded the Hydrographic Office here in 1795

so we were well behind the French, and yet throughout that

whole period, we were still just navigating around the coasts

with Collins's old atlas. So it did serve a purpose, and it

filled that job very well. There are references right up to the

end of the 18th even into the early 19th century, where

merchant mariners was particularly saying of such and

such sea Collins and this crops up in journals quite frequently,

much, much beyond the time when we were to think that those maps

were out of date. So the Hydrographic Office that was

founded in 1795 finally grasped the nettle and sort of took back

the initiative from the French. And in the 19th century, of

course, the Admiralty chart became the benchmark for

quality. And I think, you know, even in the 21st century, when

we have everything on a computer screen, there is still a need

for printed maps, and they are still produced, and British

Hydrographic Office charts are still considered the pinnacle of

that sort of activity. So Collins didn't necessarily leave

an enormous legacy personally, but he set the ball rolling for

British map making to be something that we're supposed to

be able to be proud of, which we should be.

Matthew Sillence: The, the period that Collins's work is

being carried out. Obviously there's a there's a lot of

national concern about security at that point in time. Yeah, one

of the things that you've you've sort of highlighted in your in

your the outline of your research, is this idea of the

the the island nation. So once you start to actually spend

spend time going around the coast, and you see the country

in its entirety, or the collection of islands, I guess,

in its entirety, you you have a different conceptualization of

that place and its people, rather in, I guess, in the way

that you know we might think back to the late 1960s, early

1970s, about the, you know, the 'Earth Rise' photograph that

went sort of global from the moon to have, you know, to have

a look back. Pale blue dot. Seemed to change the way people

thought about the world. Think about the kind of humanity,

basically, in its future. What was there? Was there a kind of a

shift in consciousness, I guess, or the way that people were

thinking about the about Britain? Yes, there was the idea

of Britain.

Peter Wells: Yes, well, the very concept of the idea of Britain

was new. And the interesting thing here is the title of

Collins's atlas. It's 'Great Britain's Coasting Pilot' to

whilst that just seems like what you call a map of the country,

but the whole idea of Great Britain as an entity was

entirely new. The previous attempt to make a British

hydrographic atlas was called the 'English Pilot', and that

change from English to British was something that was very much

at the fore of thinking at the time, Britain as a concept

didn't yet exist politically. After all, the Act of Union that

made the Scottish and English parliaments one didn't occur

until the reign of Queen Anne, although the crowns had been

unified under James the First in 1603 politically, Scotland and

England were still two separate nations. So Collins making his

atlas as 'Great Britain's Coasting Pilot' was quite a new

idea. And it did start well, I'm not sure that this necessarily

meant it started saying but it was part of that idea of

developing a national identity that meant, essentially, we

could stop fighting each other and start properly fighting the

French, which is what really happened. Prior to that, we had

been constantly just fighting the Scottish, and before that,

we've been busy suppressing the Welsh and all the time we were

busy suppressing the Irish. After the end of the 17th

century, the focus of British endeavor was basically to fight

the French. So it shifts out, yes, we start looking outwards,

and that goes at the same time that we start saying there's

more to trade than just taking salt to the Mediterranean and

bringing back silks, we can go globally on this. And this is

why, in the 18th century, following on from Commons this

period, the growth of the Navy was absolutely enormous, leading

eventually to the sea based empire. And although we tend to

think, you know, the British Empire was a bad thing these

days, but actually, in the early days, it was basically a loose

trading organization. The Empire was sea lanes connecting

individual points. It wasn't necessarily about owning all of

Canada or controlling all of India that came rather later in

the 19th century, but having so it's more about having that

points along the coasts of those places was where the Empire

started, and that was all sea based, and that's what Collins

was starting to express with this idea of Great Britain as a

unit, as an entity.

Matthew Sillence: So just to I guess shift a little bit from

the away from the history and Collins's achievements and the

kind of political context, to think a little bit more about

the well, your project actually, And what you're what you're

doing in, in, in your research, because this, this is an inter,

this is an interesting thing. When I was reading reading, I

was, I'm kind of familiar with creative non-fiction. You've

described this as a, as a, an academic literary biography.

What, what was behind your decision to approach the work in

this way, so through sort of literature, drama and creative

writing, as opposed to, say, doing a, you know, historical

critical study of of this individual or this particular

Peter Wells: Well, to some extent, this is a historical

time?

critical study of this chapter's time. This could have been done

in the School of History just as easily as an LDC. But really my

object was to put it in very blunt terms, to read, to write a

book that was readable. And no, I don't want to put my head on

the block, but it has to be said that not all academic texts make

for enjoyable reading.

Matthew Sillence: That's probably true.

Peter Wells: And you could write this as. A perfectly good

academic monograph. But I think there is more to it than that,

because underlying all of these historical narratives is a

story. It is a narrative. So if you're going to tell a story, my

view was that you should tell it like a story. Now that doesn't

mean it can't be fully informed academically and it can't have a

proper critical underpinning, but it's interesting enough that

it becomes a story as well. So what I'm trying to do is make an

amalgam between archival research and a ripping yarn. Now

I don't know how possible that is, but this is an attempt to do

it. And I we were all inspired by certain books, but a couple

of books that particularly inspired me, one of which stood

out when I first read it as a sort of the pinnacle of an

example of what I'd like to do was a book by Mary Hollingsworth

called 'The Cardinals Hat'. Oh, yeah, I've read it and it, I

can't remember when it came out. 2000, 2005 something like that.

It was based entirely on an enormous trove of archives,

letters and account books that were lurking in the State

Archives in Modena in Italy, about the household of a

renaissance Archbishop epollito deste, as you'll remember now,

he's only remembered for building the magnificent Villa

d'Este in Rome, but prior to that which he did at the end of

his life, he had a whole career. He was made Archbishop of Milan

at the age of nine, like you do, and he was a renaissance prince,

and he kept these magnificent accounts. Now, she found these

accounts in this archive, I don't know how, and turned it

into a story, but when you read the story, there's a

scholarship. Is phenomenal, but the story is what stands out.

It's an absolutely gripping tale of ordinary people supporting an

extraordinary man. And that's not something that you get just

out of an economic monograph. On those account books that would

be quite a different read altogether. So what I'm trying

to do is humanize the figures of the Navy. We don't know what

Collins looked like. We have his handwriting, but we know very

little about him, but we can paint a different kind of

picture out of what he did and how he did it, and what the

reactions to it were and how the results looked. So that sort of

amalgam between where art and science was what led me to the

idea of the literary academic biography. It should be fully

footnoted. There should be a justification for every

statement made. The sources need to be critically assessed, but

the whole thing needs to be presented in a way that's going

to keep the reader turning the pages. Now, I don't think that's

an impossible balance to achieve. It's an exciting

Matthew Sillence: one. I mean, it's a very hopefully. It

definitely, I mean, certainly from this conversation, what

you've been describing with Collins's life, his

achievements, the people that he was connected to the

circumstances, a lot of those, I guess, you've kind of developed

a bit of a dramatis personae of the of the period. So, and he's

and he's one of these players, he's also got this tremendous

challenge, I guess in his career, you know, he's got seven

years to work on this, on this, this survey, I think, any good

story, the main character, or, in this case, you know, the hero

of the story, or the protagonist that you're dealing with, I

guess, is, is going to face some kind of momentous challenge,

Some kind of thing that there's going to be drive them forward.

And we guess we've seen that a lot in I'm just trying to think

of kind of modern interpretations of this. We've,

we've tended to look at sort of scientists in the 20th century,

you know, Oppenheimer and others. We we've, we've elevated

that to a kind of, well, very in this case, in Oppenheimer's

case, a very troubled biography, but the but we've elevated those

stories which are actually about modern history, there are about

these significant changes, these networks, these changes in the

way that we view the world and we think about the world and

there being humans in that. It's not just a series of events that

happen in world history, that we do not have some kind of agency

or agent in them.

Peter Wells: The idea that history is something that

happens to other people exactly. It's not like that. And when you

look at what was going on in the late 17th century in England,

and look at the political turmoil, and then look at the

political turmoil that we're facing today. The parallels are

obvious, and as they always say, if you don't learn from your

history, you're condemned to repeat it. And I think

unfortunately, we've had a lot of senior political figures in

Britain in recent years that didn't learn from their history.

So we repeated it. And what do we get? Chaos and upheaval.

Matthew Sillence: Peter, it's been a pleasure listening to you

talk about the project. I know your part. You're only part the

way through. You still got, you still got and it will occupy a

lot of your life, and I hope an enjoyable experience as well,

because not only have you talked about things that have sort of

stood out so far in your your work, no doubt you'll find other

things as you progress with the project. And so it'd be great to

to learn more about that in the future. Many of the things that

you've you've talked about, we will be putting on the show

notes today. So if people need to find a bit more about Collins

himself, there's a 'Dictionary of National Biography' industry,

isn't there? So, so we'll put those online. Mary

Hollingsworth's book is a is a really fascinating read, as you

say. And I will put a link to that on there as well. But are

there other resources, things that you think people should go

and, you know, have a look at, maybe to get them into name, you

know, maybe naval history, maybe cartography, maybe hydrography,

anything that you that you think would be a good starting point.

Peter Wells: One of the things I would always recommend anybody

who's anywhere near the south of England to do is go and visit

the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. Yeah, it's free for

starters, and it's absolutely fascinating. And we do sometimes

rather think, Oh, another dusty museum, but they've managed at

that. I was there not long ago. They've managed a really good

amalgam at Greenwich between the sort of family friendly make it

all hands on for the kids, and the actual display of stuff that

entertains and informs adults. And it was heaving with people,

of course, but that is a good sign. So I recommend anybody

who's anywhere near Greenwich go and look at the river, because

that's where these ships went up and down. That was where

everything was centered on the River Thames. And while you're

there, pop into the National Maritime Museum. It is so

worthwhile.

Matthew Sillence: Great. Thank you. Yeah, it's a fantastic

institution. And I think you've, you've given us a whole, a whole

kind of extra dimension to to appreciate this, appreciate

maritime history and the development of of kind of naval,

naval mapping projects. So thank you very much, Peter, great to

have you on the show, and best of, best of luck with your

future.

Peter Wells: Thank you very much for having me. It's been

fascinating. Thank you. Bye.