The Bones of the Mary Rose

What Henry VIII's warship tells us about Tudor seafaring life

On the afternoon of 19 July 1545, Henry VIII stood on the shore at Southsea Castle and watched his favourite warship die.

The Mary Rose had served him for thirty-four years. She had been his flagship, his pride, the physical expression of a king who believed, with considerable conviction, that England’s future was maritime. She had fought the French in 1512, raided Brittany, and been rebuilt and enlarged until she bristled with the most formidable armament the Tudor navy could assemble. On that July afternoon she was leading the charge against a French invasion fleet that had entered the Solent with more than a hundred ships and the genuine intention of landing troops on English soil. The battle had barely begun.

She fired her guns, began to turn, caught a gust of wind, and in a matter of minutes was gone.

The king’s reaction is not fully recorded, which is perhaps appropriate. Some disasters are too public and too humiliating to leave a paper trail.

What the water kept

The only confirmed eyewitness account came from a Flemish sailor who survived the sinking. He told the Imperial Ambassador, François van der Delft, that the Mary Rose had fired all her guns on one side and was turning when the wind caught her sails, heeled her over, and drove her open gunports beneath the waterline. The water entered. She rolled to starboard, and with few access points between decks and a heavy anti-boarding net spread across the upper deck, the five hundred men aboard were trapped. Only those stationed in the bow and stern castles, or already in the rigging, escaped with their lives.

Among the dead was Vice-Admiral Sir George Carew. Perhaps as few as twenty-five men survived.

The ship settled into the silt of the Solent at an angle, and the mud did what mud does: it covered her. Over a few months, half of the hull infilled with estuarine silts, encasing much of the ship and her contents, including the crew. The preserved half sat there for the next four centuries, slowly being forgotten.

It was rediscovered in 1967. In 1982, the hull, its artefacts, and the bones of 179 crew members were excavated from the Solent and brought to the surface — one of the most extraordinary moments in the history of British archaeology, filmed live for a television audience who watched a Tudor warship rise from the sea like a mythical creature.

The hull and its collection of 19,000 items are now on display at the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth, and research on the remains continues to uncover aspects of the identities and lifestyles of the crew.

What those 19,000 items reveal is something rarer than treasure. They reveal ordinary life.

A floating community

The Mary Rose was not simply a military vessel. She was a floating community, a microcosm of sixteenth-century society. She housed not just sailors, but archers, carpenters, surgeons, cooks, gunners, and a barber-surgeon — each man with his role, his tools, his meagre possessions.

The hierarchy of the ship is legible in the wreck. Officers had their own cabins, pewterware, books. Below decks, the ordinary men left a different kind of record: peppercorns; clothing; games; musical instruments; lice combs; cooking utensils; stored food. Wooden bowls with personal marks scratched into the base, because few of the crew could write and the marks served where a name could not. More than sixty nit combs have been found, alongside shoes — over two hundred and fifty of them — rings, leather jerkins, prayer book covers, rosaries, portable sundials, and pots and pans of all sorts.

There is something quietly devastating about a nit comb. It belongs to the category of objects that make the past suddenly and uncomfortably close: the kind of thing you can hold in your hand and understand immediately, without any scholarly apparatus, because the human situation it addresses has not changed.

There is a story — possibly apocryphal — that one of the barber-surgeon’s pots of ointment bore the mark of a scooping finger when it was first opened, preserved in the contents from the last time it was used.

What the bones say

The artefacts tell you what a man owned. The bones tell you what a man did.

In general the Mary Rose crew were strong, well-fed men, but many of the bones also reveal tell-tale signs of childhood diseases and a life of grinding toil. The bones showed traces of numerous healed fractures, probably the result of on-board accidents.

The archers are the most striking example. The Mary Rose carried some three hundred longbows and several thousand arrows, and skeletal examination found a disproportionate number of men with a condition known as os acromiale, affecting their shoulder blades — the same condition seen in modern elite archery athletes, caused by placing considerable stress on the arm and shoulder muscles. Among the men who died, it is likely that some had practised with the longbow since childhood and served on board as specialist archers. The archer bears the marks of that repetitive strain in his bones, and his finger-bone is grooved from the bowstring.

One group of skeletons have the fused vertebrae associated with heavy physical labour such as the lifting of cannonballs and manipulation of the huge guns, identifying them as a gun crew.

The bodies remember the work even when the names are gone. The only positively identified person who went down with the ship was Vice-Admiral George Carew. Of the hundreds of others, nothing was recorded. The only source of information for these men has been the osteological analysis of the bones found at the wreck site. Their identities, their families, their histories — all gone. What remains is what the work wrote into their skeletons.

A more cosmopolitan world than we expect

One of the more surprising revelations of the Mary Rose research is how international the crew turns out to have been.

Isotope analysis of dental samples suggests that as many as three of the crew may have originated from warmer, more southerly climates than Britain. Five have isotope values indicative of childhoods spent in western Britain. At least one crew member was of North African ancestry. One of the survivors was a Fleming. A Spanish surgeon is recorded as serving on the Mary Rose in 1513.

The Tudor world was considerably more cosmopolitan than the standard picture allows. Seafaring does that to a population. Men followed work across borders that mattered enormously on land and barely existed at sea. The Mary Rose, a flagship of Henry VIII’s new English navy, went to the bottom of the Solent with men from the Mediterranean and the Atlantic seaboard and possibly sub-Saharan Africa aboard her. The Tudor navy, for all its pomp, was a genuinely international enterprise.

What the museum does

The Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth is, by some margin, one of the more remarkable things Britain has done with an archaeological discovery. On one side of a glass wall you see the actual timbers of the Mary Rose; on the other, exact replicas of the ship’s decks are arranged with thousands of original artefacts precisely where they were found. This “ship and shadow” effect is brilliantly executed. It is like looking through a ghostly x-ray of the ship, seeing where the barber-surgeon kept his instruments, where the archers stored their bows, where the officers ate and slept.

Facial reconstructions based on forensic science and osteo-archaeology — the same technology used by Scotland Yard — have brought seven of the ship’s company to life, their faces displayed alongside their personal belongings.

The museum’s tagline is worth repeating: When their world ended, our story began.

Five hundred men and boys died on the Mary Rose (some as young as thirteen) along with a small dog. The museum’s director once noted that he could speak of the death of the five hundred men to a roomful of people and be met with silence, but as soon as he mentioned the dog, there was a collective sound of sympathy.

This says something true about how we receive the past. Statistics are abstract. A dog is specific. Both matter.

Thirty-four years, one afternoon

The Mary Rose was built in Portsmouth in 1511. Her life coincides almost exactly with the reign of Henry VIII. She was his first major warship, the physical declaration of a king who meant to be taken seriously at sea. She served for thirty-four years, fought in multiple campaigns, and was refitted and enlarged as the technology of naval warfare changed around her.

She sank on a July afternoon, in less than six minutes, within sight of the shore where her king was watching.

What the sea kept is extraordinary. The hull, the artefacts, the bones, the lice combs, the archer’s grooved finger, the possibly-apocryphal fingermark in the surgeon’s ointment. The ordinary record of several hundred men going about the work of their lives on a summer morning, without any reason to think it would be the last one.

That is what maritime archaeology does at its best. It recovers not the history that was written down, but the history that was lived.