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Naval history documentary exploring the greatest maritime archaeology project in British history - Henry VIII's Tudor warship, the Mary Rose. The Mary Rose was eventually discovered, excavated, and amazingly raised from the bottom of the Solent. Latest research has revealed some fascinating facts about this iconic Tudor warship and her crew. This program also investigates how the Mary Rose project helped create modern underwater archaeology, examining the techniques, challenges, and triumphs of the divers and archaeologists involved with the ship.
Over 20 years after the Tudor ship, the Mary Rose, was lifted from Portsmouth harbor, maritime archaeologists attempting to complete the jigsaw return to the wreck site. It tells not only of the artifacts discovered - cooking utensils, prayer books, weapons - but also reveals the stories of the sailors themselves. Dramatic reconstruction and detailed graphics provide a picture of what life would have been like on a Tudor warship.
Naval history documentary exploring the greatest maritime archaeology project in British history - Henry VIII's Tudor warship, the Mary Rose. The Mary Rose was eventually discovered, excavated, and amazingly raised from the bottom of the Solent. Latest research has revealed some fascinating facts about this iconic Tudor warship and her crew. This program also investigates how the Mary Rose project helped create modern underwater archaeology, examining the techniques, challenges, and triumphs of the divers and archaeologists involved with the ship.
Over 20 years after the Tudor ship, the Mary Rose, was lifted from Portsmouth harbor, maritime archaeologists attempting to complete the jigsaw return to the wreck site. It tells not only of the artifacts discovered - cooking utensils, prayer books, weapons - but also reveals the stories of the sailors themselves. Dramatic reconstruction and detailed graphics provide a picture of what life would have been like on a Tudor warship.
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TVTranscript
00:00A true example of a time capsule.
00:03We have objects that just don't survive anywhere else.
00:07The team's work has revealed the fullest ever picture
00:10of what life was like for the men who crewed a Tudor warship.
00:15King Henry VIII's favourite warship.
00:18They have unlocked the secrets of the Mary Rose.
00:30Two decades after the raising of the Mary Rose,
00:47a dive vessel is back off the coast at Portsmouth.
00:51The wreck site is under threat from a deep water channel about to be dredged.
00:56This could be the archaeologists' last chance to re-excavate the seabed.
01:01And they have just three weeks to do it.
01:05Among those preparing for the morning dive
01:07are two maritime archaeologists, Christopher Dobbs and Alex Hildred.
01:13But this is not the first time Christopher and Alex have dived this site.
01:18As archaeology graduates in the late 70s,
01:21they took part in the greatest excavation of a shipwreck
01:25the world had ever seen.
01:27I don't know what makes people passionate about the Mary Rose.
01:30I just know that almost every single one of the volunteer divers that worked
01:35share a love of the Mary Rose that you just can't understand.
01:40You can't tell anybody else what it's like.
01:42It's just there, it's within your being.
01:44I think it's the fact that you have been involved in something
01:47which was the most important thing in your life.
01:50We lived, we ate, we slept on the dive vessel.
01:52Everything was raising the Mary Rose.
01:54And I think that feeling started with the first dive.
01:58Divers had been searching for the Mary Rose
02:00in the murky waters of the Solent for many years.
02:04When, in the early 1970s,
02:06they discovered three ships' timbers protruding from the silt.
02:11It was unconceivable how big the ship was.
02:13There were only a few timbers at that stage sticking up above the seabed.
02:17And you couldn't, because you couldn't see very far,
02:19you couldn't piece them together to actually realise how big the ship was.
02:25Named after Henry VIII's favourite sister,
02:28the Mary Rose was a formidable warship,
02:31one of the first to carry heavy cannon below deck.
02:35For 34 years, she was the pride of Henry's navy,
02:39until she sank while engaging a French invasion force off Portsmouth.
02:44The nation was in real peril from an invasion from the French.
02:49We had invaded France, we had taken Boulogne.
02:53The French were coming back, wanting to seize Portsmouth,
02:56the central, pivotal position of our maritime might.
02:59And there we were, going into action,
03:01and we lose the most significant,
03:03or one of the most significant of our ships.
03:06Disaster.
03:07The Mary Rose was not sunk by enemy cannon, but an ill wind.
03:11Her open gun ports were swamped, sinking her in front of King Henry,
03:15watching from the shore at Portsmouth.
03:17If you can imagine the pride of the fleet,
03:21a really significant ship with many hundreds of people on board,
03:25going down, sinking in front of the king,
03:28on South Sea Common here, watching,
03:30crying out, they are drowned like rattans.
03:32To watch this, the impact on this country must have been enormous.
03:36For over 400 years, the Mary Rose lay at the bottom of the Solent,
03:41slowly disintegrating into the seabed beneath her.
03:46Although the subject of myth and legend,
03:48no one knew what the Mary Rose looked like.
03:51There were no plans or drawings.
03:53All that remained was a single artist's impression.
03:57Now look at this absolutely beautiful book.
03:59If we open it up, we can see that actually,
04:03it was presented to King Henry VIII in 1546.
04:07And it's a declaration of the Royal Navy of England,
04:10composed by Antony Antony, one of the officers of the ordinance.
04:14If we turn the page, we'll find the most important significance for us,
04:19the only illustration we have of the Mary Rose.
04:24What it's depicting is not necessarily
04:26the most artistically accurate illustration of a naval ship,
04:31but what it does show is a four-masted sailing vessel bristling with guns.
04:36It shows a main deck and another two rows of guns on top of it.
04:40And it's absolutely incredible to be able to look at the illustration of the ship
04:45and to realize that the hand that put this fantastic source of information together
04:50is somebody who had a detailed knowledge of the ship, he'd been on board,
04:55and who is also passionate enough to be able to put together
04:59what is undeniably an absolutely beautiful series of illustrations,
05:03giving us the only illustrated inventory of the 16th century.
05:07The divers in the 1970s realised they'd found the skeleton of the Mary Rose.
05:13But how had she survived for so long?
05:16After the Mary Rose sank, she was very, very quickly filled up with silt,
05:20because this murky, solent water would come in through the gun ports and the open hatches.
05:25The silt in the water turns into a lovely, like, buttery clay,
05:29and it would just build up in the ship, like the silt in the water.
05:33Initially, they were unsure of what remained of the ship, but the excavation went ahead.
05:39We used something called an airlift. It's been called an underwater vacuum cleaner.
05:44You would feed the spoil, the silt, up the airlift, and then it would be deposited down tide.
05:52The silt in the water turned into a lovely, like, buttery clay,
05:56and it would just build up in the ship, like the silt in the water.
05:58You would feed the spoil, the silt, up the airlift, and then it would be deposited down tide.
06:03As we dug down and down and down through the silts, you'd suddenly come across
06:08perhaps a bit of a bit of timber, and it was really exciting,
06:11because you just didn't know what you were going to find next.
06:14Over a ten-year period, the divers removed the silt.
06:18What they discovered was beyond their wildest dreams.
06:22There, perfectly preserved, was almost half the hull of King Henry's warship.
06:36But the hull was not the only thing the solent silt had preserved.
06:40Trapped inside the ship, in remarkable condition, were the contents of the Mary Rose.
06:47Cannon, longbows, sailors' chests, all manner of personal possessions.
07:01And, perhaps more poignantly, the remains of the crew,
07:06trapped below deck as the warship sank.
07:08Some still wearing the shoes they drowned in.
07:13While Christopher Dobbs and Alex Hildred were working on the seabed in the early 1980s,
07:19up on the deck of the dive vessel was Andy Elkerton.
07:21Well, when I started here, I was a fines assistant,
07:24which was basically receiving the fines when they came up from the seabed,
07:27giving them their initial ID, and then giving them their ID card.
07:31And I was a fines assistant, and I was a fines assistant.
07:35When they came up from the seabed, we were giving them their initial identification,
07:39cleaning them, making sure they were safely packaged up,
07:42and then getting them back onto shore.
07:45Over 19,000 artefacts were raised from the Mary Rose.
07:50In the two decades since, over 11,000 of them have been conserved, and often restored.
07:56You could say that you see these objects and you become immune to them, but it's not true.
08:03Each and every day, you can look at them, you can see something different.
08:06You discover something more that takes you one step further along the way of understanding
08:12what life is like in this period of time.
08:15What you have here is a true example of a time capsule.
08:21We have objects that just don't survive anywhere else.
08:24It's the things that they dress in.
08:26It's the things that they own.
08:29It's the things that they eat from, the things that they drink.
08:31And in our case, literally things that they ate.
08:36From the remains of the surviving hull and the artefacts found within it,
08:40it is now possible to build up a picture of life aboard the Mary Rose.
08:48A ship that was shrouded in mystery can now be brought to life.
09:02The ship would have been quite crowded.
09:04You're talking about a crew of over 415 men.
09:08If you put the officers' retinue on top of that, you're probably approximating 500.
09:14Life on board would have been pretty grim.
09:18The ship would have been dark, gloomy, pretty airless for the most part.
09:23We're not talking about a society where showers and baths are the norm,
09:27and we're certainly not talking about a society where
09:30and we're certainly not talking about a vessel where
09:34facilities for having a wash are the norm.
09:37It's clear from the wreck that with no portholes,
09:40lighting would have been a serious problem.
09:45What hadn't been known for sure was how the crew would have seen below decks,
09:49until the archaeologists discovered 18 wooden lanterns dispersed around the ship.
09:54And even more primitive, a wooden candlestick with the remains of a candle.
10:02Within the dark, cramped hull, the crew worked and played.
10:12We've got a lot of evidence for what the crew did in their spare time.
10:15We found a lot of dice on board.
10:17The Tudors were inveterate gamblers.
10:19On top of a barrel, we've got a game of nine men's Morris.
10:22We also found a backgammon set.
10:25Beautiful work of art it is too.
10:29And for those who could afford it, the coins to gamble with.
10:38Sometimes the revelation lay in what the archaeologists didn't find.
10:42There is no evidence for beds for sleeping that we've recovered from on board the ship.
10:47You would expect most people to sleep where they worked.
10:50If you're a gun crew, you slept next to the gun.
10:52If you're an ordinary crewman, you're jammed into sleeping where you work.
10:57But then space isn't a consideration. It's a warship.
11:03While the artefacts give a new meaning to the ship,
11:06it's still a bit of a mystery.
11:09While the artefacts give an insight into life on board,
11:12there was something on the seabed which would reveal much more about the crew.
11:17The human remains.
11:22The silt which had preserved everything within the Mary Rose
11:25had also entombed 179 individuals,
11:29about half of the ship's complement.
11:39In an act of symbolism, in May 1983,
11:42an unknown mariner recovered from the Mary Rose
11:46was laid to rest in Portsmouth Cathedral.
11:51But what would the bones of the remaining sailors reveal
11:54about the men who lived and died aboard the Mary Rose?
11:58It must have been horrendous when the ship was clearly going down.
12:04And from the disposition of the bones,
12:08it's clear that men were fighting to try and get out.
12:11Dr Anne Stirland is a forensic anthropologist
12:14who has spent much of her life working with the police.
12:18In the early 1980s, the Mary Rose Trust
12:21asked her to look at the human remains found in the ship.
12:25The significance of this group of skeletons is
12:28it's the only Tudor warship crew we have in the whole world.
12:33And it allows us access to ordinary people,
12:37to ordinary men, which is really exciting.
12:41Whenever one works on a group of skeletons from an archaeological site,
12:44the most thrilling thing about it
12:46is that you're actually touching the people.
12:48You're not looking at bits of pot.
12:50You are actually looking and touching the people,
12:53and that's what engages me.
12:56Dr Stirland discovered that the 179 individuals were all male,
13:01predominantly in their early 20s.
13:04People often ask me,
13:06it's one of the most common questions I'm ever asked,
13:09is that they were much shorter than us, weren't they?
13:13Well, all the analysis that I did on the bones
13:16indicates that they were very similar to us.
13:21They were perhaps a little bit shorter,
13:23though the average height is five foot seven,
13:27five foot seven and a half.
13:28The bones were to reveal more secrets,
13:31especially about those who worked the guns.
13:38The back of his spine has got these enormous curved...
13:42Sticking out bits, I think it is.
13:43Yes, articulations which are gross.
13:46They're much, much bigger than you normally see them.
13:50But better still, further up,
13:54up here in the spine,
13:56they get even more extreme, these articulations,
14:00even more curved.
14:01And here, this one, in life, that will have been fused.
14:07He will not have been able to move that back very much.
14:10And I wonder if he was one of the men
14:13who was involved with the breech loader,
14:16lifting that breech block up and down all the time.
14:21In order to investigate the health of the crew,
14:23the bones were compared with a group of young men
14:26buried in a medieval cemetery in Norwich.
14:30The men from Norwich had far more pathological changes
14:34of a fairly dramatic nature.
14:36There was leprosy in the group.
14:38There was six cases of venereal syphilis in the group.
14:41There was tuberculosis in the group.
14:43There was evidence of dietary deficiency, et cetera.
14:48On the other hand, the Mary Rose men
14:50were fit and strong and healthy.
14:52The bones are extremely robust.
14:54There are no diseases.
14:55There's no evidence of leprosy.
14:57There's no evidence of syphilis.
15:00One explanation for the comparative health
15:03of the men of the Mary Rose might be explained
15:06by the contents of one of 51 wooden chests
15:09discovered in the warship.
15:12This chest was the star find of the 1980 diving season
15:17because inside were 64 different objects,
15:20from syringes and razors to ceramic jars and wooden pots
15:23still containing potent ointments.
15:26All had once belonged to one of the most important members
15:29of the ship's company, the barber surgeon.
15:32The ordinary soldiers and sailors on the Mary Rose
15:35who were people in the prime of life
15:37and were the strongest and fittest soldiers and sailors
15:42in the nation by and large,
15:44they would not in a day-to-day life
15:47have the services of a barber surgeon.
15:49So it was seen as a reassurance to the crew
15:53that they had a surgeon on board
15:55to tend to their wounds and their general health.
15:59The barber surgeon's role varied hugely,
16:03from amputations and the extraction of bullets and arrows in warfare,
16:08to the more obscure, like the letting of blood,
16:11a common practice in the 16th century
16:14for over-energetic young men.
16:17He was even responsible for the pulling of teeth.
16:25Some of the instruments in the surgeon's chest
16:27were quite horrendous.
16:30Included amongst these were an array of syringes.
16:33There was a urethral syringe for administration of mercury
16:37for the French pox.
16:39We always called our nasty diseases after our enemies.
16:44And some ironstone jars which had some medicines in them,
16:48greasy pastes made probably out of goose grease
16:52or pig's grease or whatever.
16:54And often these were used to cover a wound,
16:56to help the healing,
16:58or if there was a canker or cancer,
17:01they would use something that was called a digestive,
17:03which actually ate into the cancer.
17:06The problem is, of course, is that it ate into everything.
17:17There is no record of the name of the barber surgeon,
17:20but a black velvet hat found within the chest
17:23is exactly the same as those in a picture of Henry VIII
17:26with the Guild of Barber Surgeons,
17:28painted just four years before the Mary Rose sank.
17:33It is possible that one of the men painted here
17:36is the senior surgeon on board the Mary Rose when she sank.
17:44Of the entire crew who sailed that fateful day in July 1545,
17:49only one person, the Vice Admiral George Carew,
17:53can be named with any degree of certainty.
17:56However, it's just possible that we may know the name
18:00of another member of the crew.
18:04One of the ordinary wooden bowls recovered from the wreck
18:07has some words carved around its base.
18:10Nykoop, cook.
18:14Was this the personal bowl of the Mary Rose's cook?
18:18And how did he cook on a ship made of wood?
18:27Beneath the naval dockyards in Portsmouth is stored something
18:30which would help the archaeologists to find out.
18:42This is where we've got the logs that we found on board the Mary Rose.
18:46We actually found 776 of these logs.
18:51It just shows how fantastically well preserved
18:55some of the things are in the ship.
18:56We can even see the bark of the birch tree from 437 years ago,
19:02which I think is absolutely stunning to see something in that good condition.
19:08This was firewood.
19:09Extraordinary as it might seem,
19:11the Tudors were using fires on board a wooden ship to cook with.
19:15And with logs of over four feet in length, they were not small affairs.
19:20While diving in the hold of the Mary Rose,
19:22the team uncovered a pile of Tudor bricks which weighed over five tonnes.
19:28But this was not ballast.
19:30These were the remains of the ship's ovens.
19:34If you look at the historical records for the Mary Rose,
19:37it has these obscure references to a cauldron in furnace set in lime and brick.
19:43And nobody really knew what that was.
19:46But what we actually found underwater was that it was exactly that.
19:54From the location of the bricks and brass cauldrons found deep in the hold of the ship,
19:58the archaeologists have been able to construct a picture
20:01of what the Mary Rose's galley might have looked like.
20:04And from this, work out how they would have cooked.
20:09Animal bones found on board suggest the food
20:11the crew may have been eating in their last few days.
20:15Meat was in abundance, beef and pork, as well as fish, and even a haunch of venison.
20:22What looks at first sight like a fairly crude cooking arrangement,
20:26it's basically just a cauldron set above a brick oven,
20:30can actually be used to cook in a variety of different ways.
20:33You could cook just a basic broth, perhaps for the crew,
20:37but in that you could cook different things.
20:40They could have bags, like muslin bags,
20:43that would hold enough meat and peas for one whole mess of people.
20:49That is, eight, ten or twelve people.
20:51And then in front of the oven, using the radiant heat from the fire,
20:54we could cook on normal pottery or wood.
20:58Using the radiant heat from the fire, we could cook on normal pottery
21:03or iron cooking pots that we actually found.
21:06And it's actually shown that this was really a very sophisticated cooker,
21:10like a modern-day agar, but with a great big cauldron.
21:13And it wasn't just a crude cooking range.
21:20The menu wasn't just meat.
21:22There would have been greens and peas,
21:25and even methods of making the food taste a little better.
21:29A pepper grinder and peppercorns were also discovered in the wreck.
21:36There were even clues about how they ate, scattered throughout the ship.
21:41We have this vast amount of eating and drinking materials
21:45belonging to ordinary people, the general crew that were on board the ship.
21:51It's quite unusual to find such a large amount of ordinary plates, bowls, dishes,
21:56because these are the sort of things, come the end of their life,
21:58they're thrown away, or they just rot away over the ages.
22:06After the food was transferred to their own individual bowl or plate,
22:11the Tudor seamen would have really just used their own knives and their fingers.
22:15Forks hadn't been brought into English society at that stage,
22:19and spoons would be reserved for people of a higher status.
22:23You notice that the plates have markings from knives,
22:26where they've been used to cut food, but the bowls don't.
22:29So the bowls weren't used for eating with their knives.
22:33And where there's food, there's drink.
22:36Most of the crew would have drunk beer,
22:38and at that time the ration was about a gallon of beer a day.
22:43Eight pints, which sounds great to us,
22:45but it would have been very, very much watered-down beer,
22:48and used because it was just so much more healthy than water,
22:51because fewer bugs would grow in it, because the yeast grows and produces the beer.
22:57The officers would have drunk wine,
22:59and they would have eaten in a much more refined way.
23:02Their food would have been taken to them
23:04and served from a dresser onto their pewter plates.
23:13We've got an amazing collection of pewter on board the Mary Rose,
23:17and some of it actually has the initials GC,
23:20which could be George Carew, who was the vice-admiral on board.
23:25So it seems that he brought his own dinner service to the ship,
23:29so that he could eat off that,
23:31and that was very, very different to how the crew ate.
23:34The officers had one other added extra with their meals.
23:38Music.
23:39MUSIC
23:51Music in Tudor times would be a bit similar to the way we listen to a radio.
23:56It's a wonderful thing.
23:57You can sing along to music, you can dance to music.
24:00A number of musical instruments were found in different parts of the ship,
24:04but one discovered by the divers intrigued them much more than the others.
24:09They had found a long-lost instrument, the still, or quiet, shawm.
24:14The discovery of the shawm was of immense importance
24:17to those who study 16th-century musical instruments.
24:23It was described as the most mysterious instrument
24:26of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
24:30Every book on musical instruments mentioned it,
24:34but said probably we would never know what it sounded like.
24:39But Charles Foster was asked to see whether he could make a copy of the shawm,
24:44and more importantly, see whether he could recreate a sound from the past.
24:48It's very heavy wood, boxwood.
24:52All the component parts of it were there.
24:55All the key work and the finger hole section was in remarkably fine condition,
25:01so it could be copied with a very great degree of certainty.
25:06Six months later, Charles Foster had pieced together the clues.
25:10The shawm was found in a case,
25:13which was a very useful way of making it more portable on board the ship.
25:18But the two parts fit together,
25:22and a brass tube was found in the bell section,
25:28which fits at this end, and a reed goes right into it.
25:32And it produces an instrument which plays very low down.
25:43The loud shawm developed into the modern oboe,
25:47but the still shawm became obsolete.
25:50The only example was found on the Mary Rose.
26:02By the autumn of 1982,
26:04divers had spent over ten years excavating the hull of the Mary Rose,
26:09and brought to the surface nearly 19,000 artefacts.
26:16But there was one last thing to be raised.
26:19At 280 tonnes, it was the biggest of them all.
26:23The time had come to raise the ship itself.
26:33Holes were drilled through the hull for steel bolts and lifting wires attached,
26:39to carefully raise the ship from the seabed that had been her home for the last four centuries.
26:49On October the 11th, 1982,
26:5360 million television viewers worldwide watched as she broke the surface
26:57at three minutes past nine in the morning.
27:00What an amazing sight.
27:02This is a wonderful moment.
27:05You hear all the sirens ringing,
27:07and I think probably the Navy will get in on the act.
27:10It has.
27:11The gun has gone off at South Sea.
27:14Obscured by a huge metal support cradle, and still lying on her side,
27:19King Henry's warship was coming home.
27:23In 1982, I was one of the salvage diving team,
27:26and I was privileged to be underwater when the Mayrose first came to the surface,
27:31and I was doing a job filling up some of the airbags that were used to cushion the wreck,
27:35and it was amazing to have been there on the day that she came to the surface,
27:39and it's certainly something I'll never forget.
27:42It had taken four years to prepare her for raising.
27:45It had taken many hours to reach the surface, and it nearly ended in catastrophe.
27:51A corner of the lifting frame had collapsed.
27:59Thankfully, the hull was intact.
28:04437 years after she had left Portsmouth to engage the French fleet,
28:09the Mary Rose, still technically a commissioned ship, returned to her home port.
28:20Despite the fact that more than half her hull had been eaten by marine organisms,
28:25nearly all of her starboard side survives.
28:34Today, the hull of the Mary Rose lies in a dry dock in Portsmouth.
28:39She is 22 years into a preservation program,
28:42which will take a further 11 years to complete.
28:45For more than a decade, the ship was sprayed constantly with chilled water
28:49to prevent the wood from drying out and cracking.
28:53Now, she is being sprayed with a special solution called PEG,
28:57which penetrates the timbers, replacing the water with wax.
29:03It's a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week process.
29:09Just occasionally, the sprays are switched off,
29:12giving the archaeologists, like Christopher Dobbs,
29:15time to inspect the ship he helped raise.
29:20Then up here, we can see where we've marked those three timbers with the orange tags.
29:25Those were the first timbers that the divers saw in 1971 underwater.
29:29And from those, then everything else here was uncovered
29:33by the divers by hand during the excavation.
29:36And that just shows what a Herculean task it was.
29:39Right underneath the Mary Rose, under the starboard side of the stern,
29:42and towering above us is the bulk of the Mary Rose.
29:45And from this area, we can get an impression of the ship's lines,
29:50the very fine lines of the ship.
29:51But also, underneath the ship here, we can get some of the impression
29:55of the repairs that were done during the life of the ship.
29:58So up here, we've got one repair piece there.
30:02It's actually a patch that has been let into the ship
30:05Up on the main gun deck, towards the stern of the ship,
30:08they were to discover the cabin of the Mary Rose's carpenter.
30:12He had a large cabin, which he even made bigger during his time on board the ship.
30:17He extended it.
30:18And the ship's carpenter might feel like just a normal trade,
30:22but actually, he was a very, very important professional.
30:25He was a very, very good carpenter.
30:27He was a very, very good carpenter.
30:29He was a very, very good carpenter.
30:32But actually, he was a very, very important professional,
30:35because if there were any problems on board a wooden ship,
30:37you'd have to send for the carpenter,
30:39a bit like how a chief engineer is so important on a warship today.
30:45The carpenter and his mates would have maintained the ship,
30:48everything from mending rigging blocks
30:50to repairing damage made by cannonballs during battle.
30:55You're in a wooden society.
30:58It's a wooden ship.
30:59Everything's made from wood.
31:00So a carpenter's got some status on board the ship.
31:04He has his own cabin.
31:05But also within the cabin, we found a chest.
31:08It was full of tools.
31:09They're not unusual.
31:10They're tools that I see in my own dad's shed.
31:13You look at it, and initially you think,
31:16it can't possibly be Tudor, but then you decide it is.
31:19Mallets, planes and hammers, the tools of the trade.
31:24But other belongings in his cabin confirmed the carpenter's status on board.
31:29There are pewter objects.
31:30Now, pewter is just not affordable by somebody who doesn't have the money.
31:34It tells us he is a man of some wealth.
31:37He's a man who aspires.
31:40Lying close to the door of the carpenter's cabin was a wooden tankard.
31:45Painted on its lid were Latin words
31:47which would give an insight into the faith of the crew.
31:50Sit deus nobis cum, quid contra nos,
31:55which is a quote from Romans 8.
31:57And it means, if God is with us, who can be against us?
32:00And we've got quite a few of these illustrations of religion
32:05and people's beliefs on board the wreck.
32:06So we've got that on the tankard.
32:09But then we've also got book covers.
32:12Again, quite amazing to find something like book covers on a shipwreck.
32:16And they're all drawn here.
32:18But some of them actually have sayings, again, like this.
32:22Verbum domini, manet in aeternum.
32:25The word of the Lord lasts forever.
32:29These embellished book covers with their religious inscriptions
32:33were almost certainly owned by officers.
32:37Only officers would have been able to afford them,
32:40or literate enough to read them.
32:49This was a time of intense religious turmoil.
32:53Henry VIII had broken with Rome over his divorce of Catherine of Aragon.
32:58Catholicism was being suppressed.
33:03And yet on the Mary Rose,
33:05it seems to be Catholic faith that was very much in evidence.
33:13Eight complete sets of rosary beads were found,
33:16some perfectly preserved.
33:19It's fascinating to get this sort of insight
33:22into the religious upheaval at the time,
33:25because in 1547, the whole practice of using rosaries
33:29was frowned upon in an injunction.
33:32And if lay people were caught using them,
33:34they had to be warned by the clergy.
33:36So to get glimpses into this very, very great upheaval
33:40in religion in Europe at one time is quite stunning.
33:42The religious changes in England
33:44had angered Henry's Catholic enemies in Europe.
33:48Dangerous times lay ahead.
33:50King Henry embarked on a massive armament programme.
33:56This picture, the Cowdray engraving,
33:58is a contemporary image of the day the Mary Rose sank off Portsmouth
34:02while engaging with the French fleet.
34:06On the day of the attack,
34:08the French fleet was on the way to the port of Portsmouth.
34:12On the shore, Henry's soldiers are armed
34:15with medieval pike staffs, bills and swords.
34:19But here, too, are the latest handguns, cannon
34:23and other weapons of the coming age.
34:28The famous English longbow would soon be gone forever.
34:33The longbow had been the supreme weapon of war in medieval Europe,
34:39but none were thought to have survived into modern times
34:42until, in 1979, one bow was found in the hold of the Mary Rose.
34:50Soon after, Christopher Dobbs discovered a chest full of them,
34:54each made from a single piece of yew
34:56and a single piece of gold.
34:58Christopher Dobbs discovered a chest full of them,
35:00each made from a single piece of yew,
35:03averaging over six feet in length.
35:11By the end of the diving,
35:12they would have found nearly three-quarters of the longbows
35:15known to have been carried on the ship.
35:19We're in one of the storage areas at the Mary Rose Trust,
35:21and here we have a selection of some of the 172 complete longbows
35:26that were recovered from the wreck.
35:28These are really the only, only examples we have of the weapons
35:32that made the English longbowmen feared by, in particular, the French,
35:36and in fact won things like the Battle of Agincourt-en-Cressy
35:40or even only 60 years before the Mary Rose, the famous Battle of Tauton.
35:44The longbow is a fantastic, fantastically designed weapon,
35:48and it's really almost sad to think that these very, very beautiful things
35:51were actually meant to kill or maim people.
35:54It was not only bows which were found in the wreck.
35:58In a particularly delicate condition, they found arrows.
36:03We've got about 2,300 complete arrows.
36:06Most of them, about 75% of those tested, show to be poplar,
36:11but ash, birch, beech, oak are also used within the assemblage.
36:17At the very end of all of the arrows, there is some evidence for the binding,
36:22and here you can see the green, which is actually the glue.
36:25That's the remnants of the glue.
36:27Now, interestingly, that green colour, we've had the arrows tested,
36:31and the green colour is actually very, very high in copper,
36:34and when the arrow is tested, both from the tip to the very, from the flights,
36:39we also picked up, although you can't see it
36:41because of the black staining of the iron,
36:43quite a high percentage of copper here,
36:44so it means copper glue was used for the iron head as well as for the flights,
36:50and that is interesting because the French were accusing the English
36:54of poisoning the tips of their arrows,
36:56and, in fact, copper, if it goes into a wound,
36:58will actually cause huge infection, and so that might be the reason why.
37:02Whether it was deliberate or whether that's just the glue that was used
37:05is still an unknown.
37:07Biological warfare of yesteryear, perhaps,
37:10but war at sea was turning away from the more traditional combat
37:14and heading towards a more long-distance fighting.
37:17Although the picture of the Mary Rose in the Antony role might not be accurate,
37:21the detailed inventory of the weapons she carried is.
37:25Now, not only does the inventory, which is extremely detailed,
37:29list the type of guns, but it also lists the number and the type of shot,
37:33and we can understand that if we look at the section on the guns.
37:35At the top, we have cannons, the largest guns,
37:37and then demicanons, slings, demislings, quarter slings,
37:41fowlers, base pieces, top pieces, hail shot pieces.
37:44The problem was that no-one knew what the names meant.
37:49The 39 cannon carried on the Mary Rose were the ultimate status symbol
37:54to show the wealth and power of King Henry.
37:58The archaeologists were to raise 25 of them.
38:04Finally, they were able to unlock a centuries-old puzzle
38:07and actually measure the power of the cannon and guns
38:10previously known simply as words inscribed on the cannon.
38:14The cannon was then turned into parchment.
38:19Now we can begin to understand what these guns actually are,
38:23and then we get some idea about the power of the Mary Rose as a fighting ship,
38:27and then by inference of the fleet as a whole,
38:29and that gives us some ability to look at tactics.
38:33We're at the time where we have the capability,
38:35and for the first time, of long-range warfare,
38:38so you're beginning to not have to see the person that you're going to annihilate.
38:43There's some sheer number of large guns you can put on a ship
38:46to actually inflict damage far enough away
38:49to not be able to see the people that you're doing it.
38:51Now we do it on the other side of the world, we do it in space,
38:54but this is a very, very important time
38:56because it's the beginning of the sanitisation, if you like,
38:59of killing by not having to get that close.
39:03Among the technological advances of the Mary Rose were the opening gun ports.
39:08Ironically, it was these which would prove to be her downfall.
39:13Left open while she engaged the French,
39:16it's thought a sharp turn sent water pouring through onto the gun decks,
39:20capsizing the ship and sending her to the bottom.
39:29August 2004, and the Mary Rose Trust have learnt
39:33that a proposed deep-water channel into Portsmouth
39:36will pass dangerously close to the protected wreck site.
39:40So for the first time since the ship's hull was dramatically raised from the seabed,
39:45archaeologists are back excavating and looking for evidence
39:48in areas which weren't investigated in the original dive.
39:55During the 1970s and 80s,
39:57the archaeologists didn't excavate the Bow Castle structure,
40:00the area at the front of the ship,
40:02built up high so that they could fight a land battle at sea.
40:05Historians have only been able to guess
40:07at what the front of the Mary Rose might have looked like.
40:11I think this bow area of the ship,
40:12because it's one of the fighting areas of the ship,
40:14is actually very, very important,
40:16and that's why, you know, I still dream of trying to find this underwater.
40:26Along with Alex Hildred,
40:28Christopher Dobbs is one of four original Mary Rose team members
40:31who will be diving this summer.
40:36They will be working underwater in 90-minute shifts.
40:47And just as 20 years ago,
40:48they start removing layers of silt in the hope
40:51that they will discover more treasures from the Mary Rose.
40:56It's not long before discoveries are made.
40:59You know, not all the finds on this dive are Tudor.
41:02We're getting objects that were left behind by us 20 years ago,
41:05a pair of fins, a Raybone Chesterman tape measure,
41:08and my favourite is this.
41:11It looks like something very corroded and very old,
41:14but it's actually just one of these, an adjustable wrench
41:17that's been in the sea for a bit longer,
41:19and this just shows quite how much things corrode underwater
41:23and really how lucky we are
41:25to have had the Mary Rose preserved under those silts.
41:28The silts are still kind to the Mary Rose,
41:31and before long, they begin to give up more objects.
41:35A length of timber,
41:37at first sight like many others previously discovered.
41:41But further excavation reveals that this particular piece of wood
41:46is of far greater significance than the divers had ever hoped for.
41:51Could this timber be part of a bigger find?
41:54Could this timber be part of a bigger find?
41:57That of the front of the vessel.
41:59Roger, we can see something with your hat camera.
42:02I'm sitting on the timber, can you see the timber?
42:05We found a substantial timber, it's five metres long
42:08and over 750 wide at its widest point.
42:12And we began to see frames coming out of it,
42:14and if we look at the skeleton view from the inside,
42:17we believe actually to be this portion here,
42:19so it's basically the bottom of the bow as it begins to crack.
42:24As it begins to curve up.
42:27What they are looking for is the bowcastle,
42:30the front part of the ship, her fighting platform.
42:40Over the next few days,
42:42the team of 12 divers search for more timbers hidden in the mud.
42:48As the diving continues, more and more are emerging.
42:52I'm astounded by how many timbers are exposed there.
42:55I wasn't sure that we would see that much in the bow,
42:58but there is tonnes down there.
43:00There's lots of loose timbers that have come around,
43:04but they're on top of really nice conditioned timbers
43:07that have probably just fallen off the wreck.
43:09And I think when we start opening up the starboard side of the bow,
43:14I think we'll find a goldmine for archaeologists
43:17in terms of what there could be of the bow structure.
43:23Much of the wood is too big to raise,
43:25but smaller pieces are traced, measured and photographed
43:29and stored on board ship for later conservation.
43:33We've been out here for ten days now,
43:35and what we're finding is that in the lower levels
43:37we're getting rather eroded timbers like this
43:39that might have a few features like churnel holes.
43:42But what's most encouraging is that in the deeper levels
43:45we're getting really good and important Tudor timbers.
43:48This one is a very, very nice all-op deck plank.
43:51You can see the elm is sort of almost glowing.
43:54And it's very, very nicely rebated away here,
43:58probably to take one of the diagonal braces that we've got in the ship.
44:02So that's a very, very special all-op deck plank.
44:05And this is in addition to all the major frame timbers of the ship.
44:09But what's particularly nice,
44:11I mean, this is my favourite that we've got so far,
44:14and we've had other examples before,
44:16is this wonderful moulded piece of outside planking
44:20from the bowcastle, and you can see this lovely moulded shape.
44:24And those were high up in the bowcastle and were quite decorative ports.
44:28They could have fired out of them, but they also looked good too.
44:32It's not just timbers which convince the divers
44:34they are in the right place for the bowcastle.
44:37A small hand-carved Tudor cannonball on the sea floor
44:41is just what Alex Hildred is looking for.
44:45The very exciting thing about this is it's exactly the right size
44:48for guns that are listed in the Antony Roll as being on the Mary Rose,
44:52but which we haven't got and which we would expect
44:54because of their size to be positioned in the bowcastle.
44:56So there's a shot for a bowcastle gun, if you like.
44:58And the next one, although it's much smaller, it's equally important,
45:01and we've got about three of these now,
45:03it's actually a lead shot, but it's got a tiny little iron dice in it,
45:07which means that it's eccentric and it spins,
45:09which means you get greater range and accuracy.
45:11And these were for the anti-personnel guns
45:13that were situated high in the bowcastle and the sterncastle.
45:16So, again, directly associated with our bowcastle structure.
45:20It's mid-August and time has run out for the team.
45:24More than 40 large timbers relating to the bow have been discovered.
45:29While the smaller pieces of wood can be taken ashore,
45:32the larger sections are covered up again on the seabed until another time.
45:37For their importance is so great
45:40that the team now hope to obtain funding for future dives
45:43to raise and conserve them,
45:45possibly reuniting them with the hull of the Mary Rose.
45:50I was not actually certain that we'd find anything under there.
45:53I knew that there would be, you know, a few eroded timbers,
45:56but I'm just astonished by how much we've revealed in the last 10 days.
46:00There's an extraordinary amount of material down there,
46:03you know, sound Mary Rose bow timbers,
46:06and I think that we may have found more of this bowcastle,
46:09this forward end of the ship that's eluded us so far.
46:14Since 1971, when the first few timbers were discovered,
46:19archaeologists have spent over 12 man-years on the seabed.