LEGACY FROM THE DEEP
- By admin
- 19 December, 2012
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Henry Lost Warship
THE YOUNGEST on board was 14. The oldest about 44. They were seamen and officers, archers and gunners, cooks, shipwrights, a surgeon, and soldiers in armor. Seven hundred men in all, they were the crew and fighting men of the Tudor warship Mary Rose, one of England’s first modern battleships.
They gambled at backgammon and threw dice when they got the chance. They liked the lively music of tabor and pipes, ate heartily, and enjoyed reasonably good health. They knew what their job was. They were a powerful force of destruction.
It was Henry VIII’s idea, one that he borrowed from Mediterranean navies, to mount heavy artillery on Mary Rose’s lower decks. Thus he helped change the course of English naval strategy, for her elegant cast-bronze cannon could cripple an enemy ship with deadly broadsides at long range, rendering obsolete medieval methods of ramming and boarding.
She was serving the king in battle on July 19, 1545. Just two years before Henry’s death, BOTH BY WILLIAM R. CURTSINGER the aging monarch was facing one of the gravest perils of his reign. A French invasion force—larger than the armada that Spain would send four decades later—had been deployed by Francis I to attack the English fleet at Portsmouth. For the first time Henry stood alone without allies among the powers of Europe, his alliance with Charles V of Spain finally exhausted. But Mary Rose was not destined to prove her prowess that day. A bizarre accident before the king’s unbelieving eyes would cheat her crew of battle glory. And their remarkable bronze cannon would join their bones in the deep.
LIKE GREAT blackened molars the ship’s timbers jutted above the sea-floor, massive and partially erod-id ed. As I drifted slowly down on them through water clouded with silt and plankton, I could envision the great vessel that lay buried underneath.
I knew the ship well, though I had never set eyes on her: a vessel, in the measurement of her time, of some 700 tuns burden that carried a crew of 415, mounted a total of 91 guns, and bore the name of a Tudor princess. She was the pride of England in her day, once described as “the flower, I trow, of all ships that ever sailed.” Few ever met a more terrible end.
Hovering just off the bottom, I examined the huge timbers, each more than a foot square at the face. As I fanned silt away with my hand, the seabed fumed and smoked around me. I was delighted, for the silt that now obscured the wreck had entombed and preserved it for more than four centuries.
Beneath me lay the remains of one of the most fascinating ships in British naval history, Mary Rose. Others had found her, but it was to be my task to explore and recover her if it could be done. In a sense the job meant bringing her home, for she had barely left port on the dreadful day she died.
Sunday, the 19th of July, 1545, in the 36th year of Our Sovereign Lord, Henry VIII of England, dawned bright and clear—a perfect summer day. That morning the king stood beside Southsea Castle at his main naval base of Portsmouth on England’s south coast. He gazed across the deepwater channel leading to the harbor entrance and waited to repel a French invasion.
Henry faced heavy odds. The French fleet then approaching Portsmouth numbered 235 ships and carried 30,000 troops. By contrast Henry had only 60 ships available. The latter included Mary Rose, an aging vessel built 35 years earlier and named for the king’s sister Mary Tudor, whose family symbol was a rose.
Although badly outnumbered, the English ships were well prepared. To wage war against his arch rival, France, Henry VIII had gathered some of the finest gun founders and smiths in all Europe to produce bronze and iron cannon for England’s coastal defenses and for the royal fleet. In 1536 Mary Rose herself had been rebuilt, and her armament increased. At some point heavy bronze guns from the foundry at Houndsditch were added—guns that she had never been designed to carry.
Now on this bright, almost windless July day, Mary Rose slowly emerged from Portsmouth with the English fleet to engage the enemy. In addition to her normal crew of 415 the ship carried 285 heavily armed soldiers, many of them longbowmen whose job was to blanket the French ships under a steady hail of arrows. Together with their armor and equipment, these soldiers added another 24 or 25 tons to Mary Rose’s weight high above the waterline.
As part of her defense, the ship carried an antiboarding net of woven rope stretched eight or ten feet above the open deck in the waist of the ship. All was in readiness for battle: bowmen stationed atop the sterncastle and in the fighting tops, cannon loaded, manned, and run forward through the gun-ports. All Mary Rose needed was a breath of wind to carry her into action. The first gust carried her to her grave.
As Henry watched from Southsea Castle, a breeze sprang up from land and the English ships surged forward. Suddenly Mary Rose veered sharply, her open gunports on the starboard side dipping dangerously close to the water. As another English ship passed within hailing distance, her captain inquired what the trouble was. Vice Adm. Sir George Carew, in command aboard Mary Rose, replied: “I have the sort of knaves I cannot rule!”
It was to be the last message from Mary Rose. As Henry watched in horror from a mile away, the stricken ship heeled farther and farther to starboard, the sea rushing in through her gunports amid the screams of men trapped beneath the antiboarding net. The king and his followers could hear the screams plainly. Sir George Carew’s wife, who stood beside Henry, fainted at the dreadful sound.
Within less than a minute, according to one account, Mary Rose vanished with “one long wailing cry.” Out of 700 men aboard, about 30—most of them fortunate enough to have been stationed in the fighting tops—survived one of the greatest naval disasters in English history. By contrast the loss, in a similar manner, of the Swedish warship Vasa nearly a century later claimed only about 50 lives.
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