It had not been seen on the surface since Sunday 19 July 1545, when, in action against the French in the Solent, the Mary Rose suddenly capsized and sank. Much of the vessel had rotted away over more than four centuries on the seabed, but what finally appeared on Monday 11 October 1982 was a full third of the ship, mostly on the starboard side, where the timbers had been protected in the deep sands and silts of an ancient sunken river-channel. (Had the Mary Rose gone down a few hundred metres away, on hard gravel, everything would long since have been lost.)
The recovery of the part-vessel was the beginning of a long process of conservation not yet complete. Waterlogged timbers retain their form but not their substance: having become mainly water, they simply turn to dust if allowed to dry out naturally once exposed to air. Instead, they must be kept damp and slowly transformed by a kind of chemical osmosis, with the water gradually forced out and replaced by chemicals that will preserve the timbers indefinitely – a process that will not be complete in the case of the Mary Rose until about 2015.
Already, though, the ongoing research programme has revealed an extraordinary wealth of information, not only about Tudor warship design and shipbuilding, but about everyday life among Tudor seamen. For, along with the ship, some 26,000 artefacts have been recovered from the wreck site. So, too, have the remains of 179 individuals, with 92 more-or-less complete skeletons, representing about half of the men (and boys) who lost their lives when the ship went down.
