This past week, in one of my favorite places on earth, the Royal Dockyards in Portsmouth England, the Mary Rose exhibit opened, the culmination of some 20+ years of conservation and preservation. While the ship has been "viewable" in the past, it was shrouded in plastic sheeting and being sprayed continuously with a mixture of water and glycol, to leach the salt out of the wood.
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| Mary Rose 2006 |
On July 19, 1545, England’s King
Henry VIII stood on the ramparts of Southsea Castle and watched as his country
came under attack. The monarch gazed out from his newly constructed citadel,
which guarded the entrance to Portsmouth Harbor on England’s south coast, at
the greatest foreign threat ever faced by his country during his long reign.
Although his navy was badly outnumbered by a fleet of 200 French ships that was
even larger than the Spanish Armada that would strike nearly a half-century
later, Henry VIII took comfort as he watched his beloved warship, Mary Rose,
engage the invaders.
Henry VIII had very little naval
power in his arsenal when he assumed the throne in 1509, which left England
vulnerable to a waterborne attack from the European continent. The king ordered
a military buildup, which included the construction in Portsmouth of the
state-of-the-art, carrack-type warship Mary Rose, built with wood harvested
from 600 enormous oak trees. Henry VIII’s flagship—which he christened Mary
Rose perhaps in honor of his sister, Mary Tudor, but more likely as an homage
to the Virgin Mary—became one of the most feared on the open seas.
After surviving three wars with the
French, the 34-year-old warship was a grizzled veteran by the time she was sent
out in July 1545 to once again fight the enemy at the Battle of the Solent.
From his perch Henry VIII watched in horror, however, as his nautical pride and
joy suddenly rolled to her starboard side. Seawater gushed through the open gun
ports, and in quick order Mary Rose slipped below the cobalt surface of the
Solent, the strait separating the Isle of Wight from mainland England, taking
more than 400 men with her. Only 35 survived the sinking of the seemingly
invincible Mary Rose. Even today the cause of the ship’s demise—whether a
mistake by the captain or crew, enemy fire or an ill-timed gust of wind—remains
a mystery.
For centuries, Mary Rose rested
undisturbed on the seabed until it was rediscovered in 1971. Divers found that
the warship’s muddy grave had preserved the wreck and prevented her erosion. In
1982, as 60 million viewers around the world tuned in on television to watch,
Mary Rose was brought to the surface for the first time in 437 years. The
following year, what remained of the solid oak ship was put on public display
in Portsmouth, the city from where the warship had been launched in 1511.
Inside a massive room in which
temperature and humidity were carefully regulated, conservators began an
extensive $44 million project to preserve Mary Rose’s remains. For nearly 20
years, conservators sprayed every inch of her solid oak beams with a fine mist
of cold water and applied polyethylene glycol to the hull. Common pond snails
were even used to eat wood-degrading organisms while leaving the oak itself
untouched. Dr. Eleanor Schofield, the project’s head of conservation, told the
Guardian newspaper that controlled air-drying removed more than 100 tons of
water from the hull and surrounding air in the last three years. As the
conservation work continued, visitors to the Mary Rose Museum could only sneak
a peek at the wooden hulk through small viewing windows, and even then much of
the vessel was surrounded by a network of scaffolding, pipes and air ducts.
The warship, however, has finally
reached a stable state and the conservation work has been concluded. After a
six-month closure in which the scaffolding and drying ducts were removed from
the wreckage, the Mary Rose Museum has reopened following the unveiling of the
restored flagship to the public exactly 471 years to the day after she sank
from Henry VIII’s sight. After entering through an airlock, museum visitors on
an elevated viewing platform can now come face-to-face with the historic ship
without any obstructions, including glass. In addition to seeing the only 16th
century warship on display in the world, museum visitors can view some of the
20,000 artifacts that have been salvaged from the wreckage site.
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| Mary Rose, conservation completed |
Well worth the wait, I'd offer! Hope to get across the pond and see her first hand myself!
And, by the way, Maritime Maunder has now passed 17,000 readers! I am stunned and humbled...and we have not even hit our second anniversary! Thank you all for your support!
Until next time,
Fair Winds,
Old Salt
