The Mary Rose: celebrating three decades of research

The Mary Rose’s final voyage was not a long one. After 34 years service, she sailed from Portsmouth for the last time to intercept a French invasion force larger than the Spanish Armada. The French king Francis I, stung by the recent capture of Boulogne, had sent a fleet to land a 30,000-strong army on English soil. On 19 July 1545 the French galleys entered the eastern mouth of the Solent, the channel between the mainland and the Isle of Wight. All that stood between them and a successful landing was a handful of the King’s Ships, the forerunner of the Royal Navy.

Watching from Southsea Castle, Henry VIII saw his fleet becalmed and immobile. The situation was serious. At the head of the English force was the warship Mary Rose. Carrying the Vice Admiral of the fleet, Sir George Carew, she was bristling with over 30 carriage-mounted guns. Finally a wind blew up as the Mary Rose engaged the French galleys only 2km from the entrance to Portsmouth Harbour. Precisely what happened next is lost in the fog of war.

Flower of England

A French witness, Martin du Bellay, claimed that their guns sank the ‘MarieRose’, but his is a lone voice and there is no sign of battle damage on the surviving part of the hull. Others blamed overloading with weapons or men – one estimate has 700 people crammed on the ship’s decks – or Vice Admiral Carew’s inability to control an unruly crew. A letter penned only five days after the loss is often viewed as the most authoritative account. Written by François van der Delft, the Holy Roman Emperor’s London ambassador, it records a conversation with a Flemish survivor. He revealed that ‘the disaster was caused by their not having closed the lowest row of gun ports on one side. Having fired the guns on that side, the ship was turning, in order to fire from her other side, when the wind caught her sails… plunging her open gun ports beneath the waves’. While consensus remains elusive, many scholars now believe that the loss of the Mary Rose came from a combination of mishaps, each harmless on their own, but deadly in unison.

What is certain is that in her final moments the Mary Rose heeled – or leant – sharply over. This is how she appears in the Cowdray Engraving of the Battle of the Solent. Depicting the immediate aftermath of the Mary Rose’s loss, her masts jut from the Solent at an awkward angle, while survivors cling to them and bodies bob in the water. Beneath the waves, the Mary Rose settled at 60° to starboard. Whatever circumstances forced her to founder at that angle were also responsible for her astonishing degree of preservation. Less than a month after her loss, the Mary Rose’s awkward repose frustrated Tudor attempts to salvage the vessel. Although the operation commenced with assurances that ‘by Monday or Tuesday the Mary Rose shall be weighed up and saved’, this ultimate prize eluded them. With so much of the ship held fast by the seabed, the salvers had to content themselves with the ship’s masts, rigging, and a few of the guns.

It is more common for wrecks to settle upright on their keel. In such circumstances the upper decks of wooden vessels are lost. After being weakened by wood-boring creatures, any exposed timbers are scoured away by the currents. Thanks to the angle at which the Mary Rose lay, portions of five decks – the hold, orlop deck, main deck, upper deck, and castle deck – became preserved beneath the seabed. This was aided by the particular conditions of the Solent. Sheltered by the Isle of Wight and with numerous streams debouching into it, this stretch of water is more akin to a gigantic river estuary. Fine silt blanketed the starboard portion of the ship so swiftly that within 18 months oyster shells that had colonised the guns were smothered. This sediment also created an oxygen-free environment, preserving wood, leather, and other organic remains in a unique Tudor time capsule 12m below sea level. Thirty years to the month since the largest intact portion of the Mary Rose was raised, the breadth of artefacts protected by those Solent silts and the insights that can be gleaned from them continue to amaze.

Raising the Mary Rose

Looking back today it is easy to forget that raising the Mary Rose was both a breathtaking endeavour and a pivotal moment for underwater archaeology. That it happened at all is thanks to Alexander McKee’s steadfast belief in the 1960s that the wreck site could be relocated. The Mary Rose’s resting place had been identified once before in 1836, when Victorian divers investigated some timbers that fishermen’s nets were catching on. Wearing the bulky helmets typical of the earliest underwater explorers they could do little more than walk around on the seabed, lassoing objects to be raised. Fortunately these divers lost interest before their attempts to dynamite their way into the wreck caused serious damage. Yet an inscription on one of the cannons they lifted identified the vessel as the Mary Rose. Its location was noted on an 1841 chart, providing a vital clue for McKee and his divers.