Mary Rose

The air inside is cool and dim, and it smells faintly of old wood. Your footsteps soften on the floor. Ahead, behind glass, a great curved wall of dark timber rises out of the gloom. It looks less like a building and more like a living thing. Those are the ribs and planks of a real warship, and they have been underwater for most of the last five centuries.

This is the Mary Rose. She was one of the first great warships of King Henry the Eighth, the Tudor king best known today for his six wives. She was built in the early years of his reign, around 1510 and 1511, and she served him for more than three decades. For a ship of that era, that was a long and busy career. She fought in several wars against France, and for much of that time she was a pride of the English fleet.

Her end came close to where you are standing. In July 1545, a large French invasion fleet sailed into the Solent, the stretch of water between Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight. The English ships came out to meet it. The Mary Rose turned, heeled over, and water poured in through her open gunports. Within minutes she was gone. The exact cause is still debated — a sudden gust, poor handling, too much weight, or a mix of all three.

The human cost was enormous. Several hundred men were on board, and only a few dozen are thought to have survived. Many were trapped below deck by netting stretched above them, netting meant to stop enemy boarders climbing in. Local tradition says the king himself watched the disaster from the shore at Southsea, just along the coast from here. Whether he truly saw it, we cannot be certain. But the story has lasted for centuries.

Here is the first surprise. The ship did not simply rot away on the seabed. She settled on her right-hand side, the side sailors call starboard, and that side sank deep into soft silt. The mud sealed it off from the worms and currents that destroy most wrecks. The exposed upper side slowly wore away. The buried half survived. What you see now is essentially a ship cut lengthways, showing her decks like the floors of a dollhouse.

For a long time the wreck was lost. Then, in the second half of the twentieth century, a team of divers and volunteers began searching for her. The wreck was found again in 1971. Over the following decade, divers made thousands of dives in cold, murky water, often with almost no visibility. They worked by touch as much as by sight. Many of them were amateurs, giving up weekends to dig through the mud by hand.

On 11 October 1982, the hull was finally lifted from the seabed in a steel cradle. Millions of people watched the event live on television. It was a tense day. At one point a part of the lifting frame slipped, and for a moment it seemed the whole operation might fail. It did not. The remains of Henry's warship came back to Portsmouth, the same harbour she had sailed from in 1545.

Raising the ship was only the beginning. Wet timber that dries too quickly shrinks, cracks, and falls apart. So for years the hull was sprayed constantly, first with chilled water and later with a special wax-like chemical that slowly soaked into the wood and supported it from within. Only after that long treatment could the drying begin. The whole conservation process took more than three decades. Few objects anywhere have needed that kind of patience.

The building around you was designed for that conservation. It opened in 2013, and its shape follows the curve of the hull. Look at the galleries beside the ship. They line up with the ship's own decks, so the objects on display sit at the same level where the crew once used them. Since the drying finished, the glass barriers have opened up the view. You can now look across at the timbers much more directly than visitors could before.

And those objects are the second great surprise. Divers recovered many thousands of artefacts from the wreck. Because the ship sank so quickly, she is a frozen moment of Tudor life. There are longbows by the dozen, still with arrows. There are cannon, both bronze and iron. But there are also wooden bowls, leather shoes, combs for removing lice, dice, musical instruments, and small pocket sundials. These are the ordinary belongings of ordinary men.

Many visitors are moved most by one small skeleton. A dog was found on board, near the carpenter's cabin. The museum staff gave him the name Hatch, after the place he was found. He was probably kept to catch rats. Elsewhere you can see the chest of the barber-surgeon, the man who treated injuries at sea. His tools and jars are laid out, and some of them still held traces of their contents.

The men themselves are here too, in a careful and respectful way. Scientists have studied the human remains recovered from the wreck. Their bones show heavy work, old injuries, and in the archers, signs of years of drawing a powerful bow. Some faces have been reconstructed from skulls. They give a glimpse of the real people behind the history — cooks, gunners, archers, and very young sailors, all lost on a single summer afternoon.

Before you leave, stand still for a moment and look at the timbers again. Notice the colour, almost black, and the fine cracks along the grain. Notice the gunports along the side, the openings that may have let in the sea. When you step outside into the Historic Dockyard, you will see the masts of later warships, and hear gulls over the harbour. The water beyond is the same water where the Mary Rose went down.