Last bid in sight to raise Henry VIII battleship

Press, 5 December 1981, Page 15

Last bid in sight to raise Henry VIII battleship

From

KEN COATES,

in London

It is now or never for one of the most ambitious marine salvage projects ever undertaken — the. raising of. the Mary Rose, the second greatest ship of Henry Vlll’s navy, which has been lying in the mud at the bottom of the Solent for the last 400 years.

Ever since the site of the wreck was located in 1965 by an historian. Andrew McKee, countless dives have been made and plans prepared to bring the great Tudor warship to the surface. This operation has nothing to do with gold or silver. But it is the largest and most important enterprise ever mounted in the short history of marine archaeology. The sinking of the ship was so sudden that the ship, crew, soldiers. Weapons ready for battle and all their everyday gear were all carried to the bottom of the ocean together. There they were preserved with a completeness that archaeologists can never hope to find on a land site. Divers have already recovered some fascinating finds in what is probably the world’s biggest single diving programme. Among 6000 objects are hundreds of bows and arrows. guns and other weapons: Tudor navigational and medical equipment, musical instruments, clothing. footwear, tableware and even pocket sundials used by

the officers of the Mary Rose. But if the hull is not raised next northern summer, it will soon disintegrate. The Solent mud that has protected it for so long is being shifted. Suction pumps and brushes carefully wielded by divers have exposed some of the timbers. But this means that the ship has become vulnerable to any storm or even an anchored ship which might drag its chain across the site. Destructive marine life is already beginning to invade the surface of the exposed timbers. Diving, which has usually stopped for the winter by this time of the year, is continuing from dawn until dusk. An all-out effort is being made until midDecember to finish the submarine archaeological dig in readiness for the salvage operation next spring. There is still much fine-

grained black Hampshire mud inside the hull, covering many secrets. It must all be cleared before the salvaging can begin, and it has to be painstakingly sifted for objects which tumbled down into the starboard scuppers when the ship overturned in 1545 — in calm water, under the very eyes of the King. The disaster happened as the French fleet threatened to attack the out-numbered English fleet, and then storm Portsmouth — in retaliation for the previous year’s English capture'of Boulogne. French sources claimed that the flagship Mary Rose was hit by cannon fire and sunk, but reports to the king’s battle headquarters suggested that a combination of poor handling and overloading was to blame. The new type of vessel’s normal complement of soldiers and sailors was 415, but tnere may have been as

many as 700 crammed aboard. There were, according to contemporary accounts of the disaster, 100 seamen aboard, but each was convinced he knew how to handle the vessel better than anyone else. .It became impossible to transmit or carry out orders quickly when a land-breeze shook her shrouds and sent water pouring aboard through the open gun-ports. “I nave a sorte of knaves whom I cannot rule,” Sir George Carew, the Vice-Ad-miral commanding the ship is said to have yelled to the captain of a nearby vessel as the Mary Rose heeled over. The King was only a few hundred yards away, on shore, and saw and heard the panic and men screaming as

the vessel plunged to the bottom.

The key to raising the timber hull is a massive road crane, mounted on a 10,000ton flat-deck barge from the North Sea oilfields.

Suspended on a “stretcher” of nylon lifting straps beneath a 150 ft lifting frame, the 300 ton hull will be transferred to a 150 ft cradle for transfer to the shore. But as soon as the timbers hidden underwater for centuries are brought ashore, new dangers loom. If they were simply left to dry out, they would soon shrink and warp into grotesque shapes. They will have to be sprayed regularly for years on end with a wax preparation which can gradually replace the moisture in the wood. And there will need to

be protected from the weather.

A permanent resting place on the foreshore at Eastney will cost at least £1 million. The Royal Navy has recently offered a drydock in Portsmouth dockyard as a temporary shelter. But the project’s organisers, the Mary Rose Trust, which consists of many volunteers, is only too aware that the sooner the Mary Rose is installed in her final berth, the sooner she can begin to earn at least some of her keep. Energetic international fund-raising has already brought in £2 million, but with rising costs, at least as much again is expected to be needed for the raising of the hull.

The reason why there were so few survivors is that many of those on board drowned immediately, weighed down by armour or trapped below decks and be-

neath the ship’s own antiboarding netting. Those who did escape were mainly lightly dressed servants who managed to stay afloat until they were reached by small boats, and seamen who leapt from the rigging as the ship went down. Andrew McKee, the man whose enthusiasm led to the eventual formation of the Mary Rose Trust, with Prince Charles as its president. says: “The Mary Rose represents a day in the life of Tudor England. Here is a four or five-storey timber structure complete with everything it contained on that day in 1545.” Mrs Margaret Rule, the archaeological director, who learned to dive in her forties for the sake of the Mary Rose, says the wreck has even revealed what the men ate — “peas still in the pod, plums with the flesh on them, and plenty of carcase

meat, even some venison." The ship was apparently well stocked with fine toothed wooden combs — a sure sign, say the experts, that the crew’ were plagued by hair lice. And the medicine chest of the barbersurgeon shows he was wellversed in the treatment of venereal diseases. Even the ship’s cockroaches and flies were

carried down into the mud. Recovery of some of the Mary Rose’s guns produced some of the biggest surprises of the project. It was the discovery of an “unmistakably Tudor” iron cannon in 1970 that finally put identification of the wreck beyond doubt. There was a bonus: radiographic scanning of the gun revealed that it had been constructed by a hitherto unknown method. Scientists were able to show that the breach loader had been made by bending a single sheet of wrought iron into a pipe which had then been “seamwelded” and strengthened with hoops. While salvors in the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries recovered many of the ship’s listed 91 guns, archaeologists hope that at least half the vessel’s armaments remain — with all the surprises that they could provide.