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The Mary Rose is the only 16th century Tudor warship on display anywhere in the world. It can be found at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard.
The Mary Rose had rested quietly since that fateful day in July 1545. The tides of the Solent had, over the intervening centuries, covered Henry’s ship with a deep layer of silt burying it from sight and mind. It was by chance that two Victorian divers Charles and John Deane, exploring the wreck of the Royal George a 108-gun ship-of the-line that sank off Spithead on 28 August 1782, learned of a greater prize. Tudor CannonNearby fishermen had complained of their lines snagging on some unknown obstacle and the brothers, pioneers of early diving, found the lines caught on a protruding timber. It wasn’t until the first bronze cannon was found that they realised the importance of their find. An inscription in Latin read, “Henry VIII, King of England, France and Ireland, Invincible Defender of the Faith, made in 1542, by Arcanus de Arcanis.” It was 16 June 1836. Over the next four years they uncovered a variety of objects: iron cannon, pottery, cloth and several human skulls. By 1840, however the Deanes had stopped work on the wreck, daunted perhaps by the enormity of the task that faced them. The timbers and memories sank once again into the sand and silt of the murky Solent. In 1965 Alexander McKee, journalist, historian and sub-aqua diver put together a team from the Southsea branch of the British Sub-Aqua-Club to join him on a project to survey a number of already known wrecks that lay beneath the Solent. Mary RoseBut McKee was also aware of the reports that the Mary Rose lay close to the Royal George and decided to concentrate much of stage two of ‘Project Solent Ships’ on the hunt for the lost warship. In the search for earlier documented evidence Alexander McKee and team member John Towse visited the Hydrographer’s Department at the Admiralty and on a chart drawn in 1841 they found the evidence they were looking for, the exact position of Henry’s warship. McKee described the moment when they unrolled the chart. “It took about 10 seconds to unroll and then Towse and I leaned forward, taking in the red cross and the name Royal George. Then sliding down to the right we saw the red cross and the name Edgar… then looking up in a north east arc towards the shallows of Spit Sand… and there it was, a red cross and the name Mary Rose.” The first dives revealed nothing, any evidence left from earlier excavations had long since settled deeper into the seabed. Modern equipment was required. With the help in July 1968 of Professor Harold Edgerton of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a scanner produced images of the area revealing an anomaly 200 feet long and 75 feet wide. It was in the exact area marked on the 19th century chart. At that stage there was no proof it was the Mary Rose that had created the ‘anomaly’. It was not until 1970, after several years of excavation using high-pressure water jets to blast away the silt and detritus, that a significant ‘find’ was uncovered. The barrel of a wrought iron cannon was found using a mechanical excavator and on the face of it very similar to the ones found by the Deane brothers although there were no markings linking it to either Henry or the Mary Rose. Subsequent tests showed it to be of an entirely different construction but it gave a weary and slightly despondent team renewed energy and determination to work on. On Saturday 1 May 1971 a diver rose to the surface and shouted, “There’s wreckage, including planking, sticking up from the muds .” It was Henry VIII's sunken ship. They had finally found the Mary Rose.
The copyright of the article The Re-discovery of the Mary Rose in Military History is owned by Neil Gunn. Permission to republish The Re-discovery of the Mary Rose in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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