Roman Mars

The art for this series was created by Aaron Nestor.

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This is 99% Invisible.

I'm Roman Mars.

There's an archipelago in the far west of the UK.

And I mean far west.

Like, once you think you're in the west, like around Cornwall, keep going.

And then take a ferry another three hours west, and you'll find yourself in a collection of islands called the Isles of Scilly.

That's 99PI producer Kelly Prime.

It's also historically one of the deadliest places in the UK to travel by sea.

If you're into shipwrecks, it's really hard not to find one here.

At least 900 shipwrecks litter the coasts of Sili, probably more.

Sometimes ships will sink on top of other older shipwrecks, so it's difficult to say for sure.

The wrecks happened on October 22nd, 1707.

It was quite literally a dark and stormy night, and there was a fleet of British naval ships bravely led by an admiral named Cloudsley Shovel.

The HMS Association crashed into one of the many jagged rocks just beneath the surface of the water.

The death toll was somewhere between 1,400 and 2,000.

It was, at the time, the deadliest shipwreck in British history.