The QUESTION

AlAJOR QUESTION regarding the loss of Mary Rose was whether she had actually engaged the enemy. The French long insisted they had sunk her by gunfire, while the English maintained that her loss was accidental. In a lower por­tion of the hull, below the level known as the orlop deck, we eventually found an answer.

 

As we excavated the hold carefully by hand and later with airlifts, we encountered skeletons on straw mattresses on the flint ballast. What were men doing stretched out in the lowest level of the ship while everyone else was at battle stations? One answer, of course, is that they had been wounded.

 

Might they have been merely ill? It’s doubtful, for Mary Rose had just left port and would not have taken ailing crew mem­bers along. The men in the hold very likely had been wounded topside and had been hurried below so as not to demoralize their shipmates by their cries and appearance. The practice was common in navies of the period, when morale was considered more vital than treatment of the injured. Even the great Lord Nelson, when mortally wounded at Trafalgar two and a half centuries later, was unceremoniously rushed to the orlop, his face and medals covered, lest his crew recognize their fallen leader and loses heart.

 

Mary Rose, it seemed, had seen action and suffered casualties, though they were probably light and had little bearing on her loss. High above the orlop, in the raised sterncastle of the ship, we found a more like­ly cause of the sinking. There our divers came upon a large and handsome bronze muzzle-loading cannon that weighed about two tons. The cannon had been loaded and run forward on its heavy wooden carriage through an unlidded gunport.

 

When we removed the cannon, we found a socket cut in the sill of the gunport, which had obviously once been used for a small swivel gun. The suggestion is strong that those who refitted Mary Rose, either in 1536 or perhaps before the Battle of Portsmouth, had increased her firepower at the risk of rendering her dangerously top-heavy—a factor that plainly contributed to her loss.

 

One of the richest finds aboard Mary Rose was a beautifully preserved barber-surgeon’s chest. In the 16th century that title was used for one who practiced medicine, surgery, and dentistry as well as barbering. The chest was a treasure trove of Tudor medical instruments and supplies. Its con­tents were so completely preserved that oint­ment in one of the small wooden jars still bore the surgeon’s finger marks from his last application of the salve 437 years before.

 

In all, there were 64 items in the chest, in­cluding drug flasks, razors, a pewter bowl for bloodletting, a mortar and pestle, a chaf­ing dish to hold lighted charcoal for cauter­ization, and the wooden handle of what probably was an amputation saw whose iron blade had rusted away.

Most of the instruments appeared simple but effective. A large brass syringe came complete with an eight-inch-long hollow needle, to be inserted into the urethra for treatment of bladder stones or that age-old scourge of mariners, gonorrhea.

 

Other implements were more terrifying in appearance than in actual use. Prominent in the collection was a large wooden mallet em­ployed in anesthetizing patients. The vic­tim, however, was never struck directly on the skull. Instead he wore a protective metal helmet designed to absorb the blow and cre­ate a series of vibrations that were said to numb his brain. So far no one on our staff has volunteered to test the theory.

 

A seaman’s chest contained one item that has altered our entire view of Tudor naviga­tion. It was a beautiful magnetic steering compass, suspended on gimbals in a wooden case, the oldest so far found in northern Eu­rope. The compass was no fluke, for we later recovered two similar ones from the ship.

 

Unlike the compass, many artifacts found aboard Mary Rose were known to have been in use on land during Tudor times. Their interest stems in part from the discovery that they were not only carried aboard ship, but in many instances were even common­place at sea. We have found so many pocket sundials, for example, that they appear to have been as popular in their day as our modern wristwatches (page 660).

 

One ingenious device rarely found ashore was apparently favored by Tudor naval offi­cers. We recovered half a dozen so-called pistol shields, panels of laminated wood and leather, each pierced in the middle by a hole for a handgun. Above the hole was another aperture for use as a gunsight.

 

The pistol shields from Mary Rose were in excellent condition, though none was quite as elaborate as the shield I once saw among a collection ashore. In addition to the hole for the handgun the shield featured the Tudor version of a secret weapon—a candle stands on top for night combat.

 

Other items from the ship came as no sur­prise. Many seamen’s chests contained a hand fishing line and bobber, doubtless for recreation as well as to augment the ship’s fare. Yet the men aboard Mary Rose had eaten well by navy standards, judging from the samples of food we have recovered. There were remnants of fresh pork, bones of venison, beef, and mutton, and a variety of other bones yet to be analyzed, skeletons of fish, fresh peas still in the pod, plum or prune pits, one of them with a dead mite still attached. Inevitably we found remains of those unwelcome diners aboard any ship, rats and insects.

 

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