Mary Rose, the famous Tudor warship which sank during England’s battle against the French in 1545, was one of the first ships able to fire a broadside, but also one of the last ones to have archers shooting longbows and huge incendiary fire arrows.
King Henry VIII’s favourite ship, Mary Rose, was constructed on his orders in 1510 in Portsmouth and it is estimated some 600 large oak trees were needed to build the warship. The ship had a carvel-built hull, with planks laid edge-to-edge to give a smooth side to the ship, enabling the use of gunports for the first time, giving the warship more fighting power and the English Navy a major boost. Till then, ships had clinker-built hulls, or overlapping planking.
Having triumphed over the French many times prior to the Battle of Solent, Mary Rose, the flagship of Henry VIII’s fleet, was in service for 34 years when it sank on July 19, 1545 in Portsmouth with a crew of about 500, out of whom only 35 survived. Of the 415 operational crew, there were 185 soldiers, 200 marines and 30 gunners and some as young as 10 years.
It is still a mystery why the ship, described as “the noblest ship of sail” during the battle, sank at the height of the battle witnessed by Henry VIII from the newly-built Southsea Castle on the waterfront at Portsmouth. There is still no definite explanation, alt-hough theories range from French fire to the ship being overweight with cannon and troops. A survivor clearly states that the ship had fired her guns on one side and was turning to fire from the other side when the wind caught her and plunged her open gunports below the water that sank her.
It took almost five centuries to retrieve the wreckage of the ship, along with 19,000 artefacts, like longbows, two-tonne guns, human and animal skeletons, books, nautical instruments, medicinal equipment, and personal belongings of the crew, commanded by Vice-Admiral Sir George Carew, like wooden eating bowls, spoons, leather shoes, musical instruments and even nit combs complete with 500-year-old lice.
Expert Venetian divers tried to raise the wreck between 1545 and 1549, but it was forgotten till 1836 when some items were salvaged. It was only in 1965 that the search for the Tudor warship launched again. In 1982, the hull of the ship was excavated.
The Mary Rose, the only sixteenth century warship on display anywhere in the world, finally has a home in Portsmouth in the newly-inaugurated museum located next to Admiral Horatio Nelson’s flagship, HMS Victory, and the ships of the modern Royal Navy.
The museum, designed by Wilkinson Eyre Architects and with interior design by Pringle Brandon, is built around the hull, like a wooden “jewellery box.”
The main draw at the museum, dedicated to the people who lost their lives on the ship, is the reconstruction of the Tudor life with focus on personal lives of the crew, whose numbers and not names have been left for posterity. Facial features of seven members of the crew have been reconstructed based on forensic science and osto-archaeology on their skulls and skeletons found at the wreck site. The skeleton of Hatch, the ship’s dog, is also on display in the museum.
The food and drink rations were limited to one gallon of ale daily for each crewmember and a pound of biscuits daily. The crew got two pounds of beef twice a week, one pound of pork with one pint of peas two times a week. For the remaining three days, the menu had ¼ fish for each of the crew served with two ounces of butter and four ounces of cheese.
The crew used personal spoons — pewter ones by officers and wooden ones by ordinary crew — to eat the meals served on square plates, which led to the term, “a square meal.” They used wooden tankards to drink ale.
“The story of the Mary Rose has fascinated people for generations. This tremendous new museum, housing together for the first time the hull of the ship and its many treasured artefacts, will give us a sense of what life was like onboard a Tudor ship like never before, helping to preserve the history of the Mary Rose for generations to come,” according to British historian Dan Snow, who is the ambassador for the new museum.