Universitas 45

DURING THE YEARS

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• 27 December, 2012
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DURING THE YEARS that followed,we came to sympathize with those who had tried to salvage Mary Rose before us. In terms of water quality The So­lent is a diver’s nightmare, ranging at best from a milky haze to something on the order of lentil soup. What can be accomplished within a week or two in the crystal waters of the Caribbean often took us an entire diving season of several months.

 

To safeguard the wreck from looters, we had formed a Mary Rose Committee and leased the site from the crown for the munifi­cent sum of one pound sterling a year. On that makeshift basis we enlisted a team of volunteer divers and technicians and began a careful survey of Mary Rose in her final resting-place.

 

In time we discovered that almost half of the hull remained intact. The ship had come to rest at a 60-degree angle on her starboard side, which had quickly settled into the mud and been preserved. Most of the superstruc­ture and the hull’s port side had remained exposed, and they eventually collapsed or were scoured away by tidal currents.

 

The hull itself contained an infinite vari­ety of treasures. With each ebb and flow of the tide, fine silt had penetrated every cor­ner of the remaining structure, gradually filling it and sealing everything inside from the corrosive effects of salt water and oxida­tion and destruction by microorganisms. Virtually everything that had gone down with the ship—weapons, tools, clothes, and even normally perishable stores—remained in a remarkable state of preservation.

The job of merely reaching those trea­sures took years, for at each stage we were determined to safeguard the hull. From my first view of those giant oak timbers project­ing above the seabed, I had cherished the hope of one day bringing Mary Rose ashore to Portsmouth, where she had been built.

 

As a result, it was 1979 before we began to excavate inside the ship. By then Mary Rose was covered by the Protection of Wrecks Act of 1973, and our committee had been replaced by a nonprofit Mary Rose Trust, organized to direct operations and raise necessary funds.

His Royal Highness Prince Charles, who had first dived with us on Mary Rose in 1975 and who showed a keen interest in her recov­ery, agreed to become president of the trust. Sir Eric Drake, a former chairman of British Petroleum, became chairman, and I was ap­pointed chief archaeologist. Now at last, with a professional staff as well as volun­teers, we began emptying Mary Rose of her precious cargo.

 

ONE OF US, I think, will ever forget the archer. He had been a man in his mid-20s, sturdily built and of medi­um height, and he was obviously no new­comer to the longbow. His skeleton lay with that of a slightly younger man beside a lad­der connecting the gun deck to the weather deck above. A bundle of arrows in a leather carrying device remained attached to the archer’s spine by a leather thong, and the remnants of what appeared to be a leather jerkin lay scattered among his bones.

 

Clearly both men had sought to scramble to safety during Mary Rose’s final moments. Probably the ship’s extreme list to starboard had prevented them from climbing the lad­der, and they were overwhelmed by inrush­ing water.

 

Careful analysis of the older man’s skele­ton confirmed that he was a professional ar­cher. Two of his middle vertebrae had been pulled forward and twisted to the left, sug­gesting chronic pressure on his spine from that side. Also his lower left arm bone was noticeably enlarged and flattened, the result of prolonged strain. Obviously he had been right-handed and had spent long hours at the butts, as archery ranges are called.

 

Such men were legendary in their time. Massed bowmen had given England the margin of victory over France in the great land battles of Crecy, Poitiers, and Agin­court. Expert longbowmen could shoot ar­rows a distance of 300 yards on an average of one shaft every five seconds—more than six times the maximum rate for the French crossbow. “The English are the flowers of the archers of the world,” declared a 16th-century French chronicler.

 

What Mary Rose taught us was that Tu­dor bowmen fought at sea even after the ad­dition of heavy guns. Many historians have assumed that archers were carried aboard King Henry’s ships merely for shore raids.

 

But the archer on the gun deck had obvious­ly been prepared for action at the moment Mary Rose went down. Elsewhere in the hull we found longbows and arrows at what clearly were battle stations.

 

The discovery of such weapons delighted experts in the field of archery, for Mary Rose has given us the only authentically dated Tudor bows and arrows. The total number we recovered was 2,500 arrows and 139 longbows, many of the latter in condition to be restrung and shot.

One specialized form of archery came to light with the discovery of two leather mit­tens packed in a wooden box among the longbows and arrows. The mittens were used by archers to protect their hands while shooting fire arrows. Only the hand holding the bow needed protection, as shown by the fact that both mittens were left-handed.