A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks (23 page)

The small finds ranged from items of clothing – over 250 leather shoes were recovered – to personal belongings that reflect the status and
wider cultural context of some of those on board. Among the most fascinating items are nine pocket sundials, each originally with a collapsible brass gnomon – the part that casts the shadow – and a small inset compass and mirror in a lid. They were set to 49 to 50 degrees north, the latitude of Nuremberg, and were the equivalent of wristwatches today. They can be compared to the gold pocket watches discussed later in this book from the wreck of the
Royal Anne Galley
, another warship carrying ‘gentlemen' and officers equipped with the latest timepieces, but by the early eighteenth century based on the clockwork mechanism that had not yet been developed at the time of the
Mary Rose
. Other artefacts in the wreck from Germany and the Low Countries included glass and pottery, a reminder that specialised places of manufacture such as Nuremberg for precision instruments were supplying increasingly wide markets through maritime trade even when the nations themselves might be in conflict.

Among the largest artefacts in the Mary Rose Museum are two 360-litre brass cooking cauldrons, one displayed as it was found, surrounded by the bricks of the oven, and the other reconstructed. An inventory of the king's ships in 1514 describes ‘Grete coper kettiles in Furnous sett in lyme and breke closed above with lede.' The ‘kettiles' were placed side-by-side on a brick floor in the hold directly on the flint ballast, a way of cushioning them against the ship's movement and keeping sparks from the fire away from the timbers. The ‘lede' of the description – a rim of lead – survives on the
Mary Rose
examples. A single cauldron of this size could have provided enough food to feed the entire crew. Some of the food was preserved too – eight casks containing over 2,000 butchered cow bones, evidence that boiled salt beef was a staple protein. The bones of several deer show that venison was eaten as well, probably by the officers, and roasted over the hearth. For vegetables the sailors would have had peas and anything else available – but not potatoes, which were only introduced into Europe following the Spanish conquest of the Incas in the second half of the sixteenth century. For drink they had a gallon of weak beer a day, safer than water and shown by the numerous wooden tankards and barrels found in the wreck, along with hundreds of plates, bowls and items of cooking equipment that attest to the central part that food preparation and eating played in life on board the ship.

The discovery of bones of cod and other fish species shows that fish was also a component of the diet. Isotope and DNA analysis of eight
samples of fish bone indicates that some of the cod was fished in the North Sea and around Iceland, but one sample may have come from the waters off Newfoundland – a fascinating link to the greatest Tudor impetus to maritime exploration, not by Henry VIII but by his father, Henry VII, whose commission in 1496 to the Venetian John Cabot ‘to sail to all parts, regions and coasts of the eastern, western and northern sea, under our banners, flags and ensigns' led to the first known European landfall in North America since the Norse expeditions described in the previous chapter. Cabot's men described a sea ‘full of fish that can be taken not only with nets but with fishing baskets', and by the time of the
Mary Rose
the seasonal fishery was bringing ever-increasing amounts of cod across the Atlantic that helped to feed Henry VIII's burgeoning navy. The evidence for diet from the wreck, while in one sense revealing the most basic day-to-day activity, therefore also provides a glimpse of the increasing geographical reach of Britain on the cusp of the colonisation and empire-building of subsequent centuries.

The clearest evidence for Henry VIII among the artefacts of the
Mary Rose
is the ten bronze guns, all of them outstanding examples of the bronze founders' skill, and cast with the ownership marks of the king on the upper barrels. The most ornate of the guns, decorated with lion's head lifting points and acanthus columns in low relief, has a Tudor rose in relief surrounded by a garter containing the words HONI SOYT QVY MAL Y PENSE – ‘Shame on anyone who thinks evil of it', the motto of the Order of the Garter. Beneath it are two inscriptions, one in Latin and one in English:

HENRYCVUS OCTAVVS DEI GRACIA ANGLIE ET FRANCIE REX FIDEI DEFENSOR DNS HIBERNIE ET IN TERRA SVPREMV CAPVT ECCLESIE ANGLICANE

ROBERT AND JOHN OWYN BRETHERYN BORNE IN THE CYTE OF LONDON THE SONNES OF AN INGLISSH MADE THYS BASTARD ANNO DNI 1537

The first inscription, ‘Henry the Eighth by the Grace of God King of England and France, Defender of the Faith, Lord of Ireland and on the Earth Supreme Head of the English Church', is particularly interesting
because of the date in the second inscription, 1537 – only three years after Henry's break with the Church in Rome and thus showing his determination at this crucial time to assert his new religious authority by whatever means possible, including having it cast on his guns. The gun is a demi-culverin, designed to fire an iron ball weighing about ten pounds, and as a ‘bastard' had a larger bore and shorter length than the standard gun of that type. Robert and John Owen had foundries in London and Calais and were gunfounders to the king; the decorative columns with acanthus capitals on either side of the gun were inspired by Roman architecture and may reflect the influence of Italian makers who also cast guns for Henry VIII in England at this period.

The other bronze guns from the wreck included culverins, another demi-culverin, demi-cannons, cannons and a cannon-royal, each type progressively larger – the cannon-royal weighing 2.4 tons – and representing two-thirds of the bronze guns listed for the ship in the Anthony Roll. With their wheeled wooden carriages, these guns represented the standard type of naval artillery for years to come and were little different in general shape from the guns in HMS
Victory
two and a half centuries later. The
Mary Rose
was one of the first ships to be equipped in this way, with guns firing through ports in the ship's side; the installation of bronze muzzle-loading guns powerful enough to fire a shot that could penetrate an enemy's hull or bring down a mast meant that sea battles could now be fought at a distance of several hundred metres, unlike the close-quarters mêlée of medieval warfare in which ships were conveyances to bring soldiers within boarding range or to be disembarked to fight battles ashore.

The
Mary Rose
was also provided with many weapons for anti-personnel action – adding to the carnage caused by shot from the big guns penetrating the sides and spraying the decks with wood splinters – including several types of wrought iron breechloader, ranging from eight carriage-mounted ‘port-pieces' to smaller guns that could be fired from the ship's rails. Breechloaders were loaded by fitting a separate chamber charged with powder and projectiles into the rear of the gun, allowing a more rapid rate of fire than a muzzleloader but with gas leakage between the chamber and the barrel reducing the power of discharge – though still capable of killing and maiming at close range. The name in the Anthony Roll of the smallest of these guns, ‘hail shot pieces', indicates their function, firing fragments of flint and metal that swept an enemy deck with ‘murthering' fire. The smallest-calibre
firearm to be discovered was an early matchlock musket, one of fifty listed in the Anthony Roll. In this way, with both anti-ship and anti-personnel weapons, the stage was set for warfare at sea over the next three centuries, until the advent of powerful breech-loading guns with rifled barrels meant that sea-battles could be fought over long ranges almost out of sight of the enemy.

The key to these weapons was gunpowder, the mix of charcoal, sulphur and saltpetre that originated in China about the time of the Belitung wreck in the ninth century
AD
and was first recorded in the west by the English philosopher Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century. By the late fifteenth century, improvements in its preparation had made it a powerful propellant and wrought-iron and bronze-casting technology had produced guns robust enough to withstand its force. Nevertheless, the
Mary Rose
also represents a time of transition and the weapon for which the wreck is perhaps most celebrated is that most often associated with medieval English warfare – the yew longbow. The excavation uncovered 137 bows, each almost 2 metres long, along with more than 3,500 arrows with swan or goose-feather flights and barbed steel heads. The bows were made of wood from the European continent – the straighter grain of yew resulting from more arid climates in Italy and Spain was preferred – and were cut to include both heartwood and sapwood, the former providing strength at the front of the bow and the latter elasticity at the back.

With muskets still being unwieldy and inaccurate, and the matchlock firing mechanism ill-suited to damp conditions on board a ship, archers served the role that sharpshooters with flintlocks did by the time of HMS
Victory
, trained to make every arrow count at close range rather than loosing a storm of arrows over a high trajectory as the English archers had done at the battles of Crécy and Agincourt. Archery is thought of as being a particularly English skill, with boys being taught from a young age and practice mandatory, but at least one of the
Mary Rose
archers was foreign-born – a man whose physical remains, along with those of a gunner, allow us to glimpse the individuals who wielded these weapons and their day-to-day lives.

Holbein's portrait of Sir George Carew in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle is one of his finest, revealing his subject with almost photographic clarity. Aged in his early forties at the time of the wreck, Carew had led a colourful life – from being pardoned by Henry VIII
for a youthful attempt to seek service in France to being dined by the king and appointed vice-admiral the night before the battle. In common with many captains and admirals on Henry's ships he was not a naval man by profession, a residue of the medieval period in which warfare at sea was considered an extension of war on land and the business of actually sailing the ship was left to the master and crew. He had recently been captain of Fort Risban in the Calais ‘Pale', the territory in France taken following the Battle of Crécy in 1346 and ruled by England until 1558; in 1537 he had served against pirates in the English Channel, his only previous sea commission. He had also been a Member of Parliament and High Sheriff of Devon, and had he survived and continued to be in favour he might have expected a higher appointment, something of a mixed blessing given the fickle nature of the king and the fate of so many of his senior officials and advisors.

Sir George Carew may be the only man on the
Mary Rose
whose portrait survives, but archaeology and forensic science – including facial reconstruction techniques – have shown the appearance of others who died in the sinking, including men identified as an archer, a gunner, a cook and a carpenter, and a small dog that may have been on board as a rat-catcher. In several cases the belongings found associated with the skeletons allow a rich picture of the men's lives other than just their professional calling, with the carpenter's cabin for example containing a beautiful backgammon board and the embossed leather cover of a book.

One of the most intriguing of the men is the ‘Archer Royal.' He was found on the main deck under a bronze gun that had rolled over him, his skull partly crushed by a cannon ball and his broken longbow beside him. He was carrying a sword in a decorated scabbard, and his status may be indicated by the remains of silk edging from his clothing and a leather wristguard embossed with the arms of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon – possibly showing that he was a member of a special company of archers who had their origin in the earlier years of Henry's reign when he was still married to Katherine, and on board because Sir George Carew had been made an officer of the ‘Gentlemen Pensioners' – the King's personal bodyguard – and was obliged to ‘furnish and make ready two good archers, to do anything the King commanded'.

His profession was shown by a twisting of the spine commonly
found among archers, and by a grooving in the bones of his right fingers from drawing a bow. Isotope analysis of one of his teeth shows that he did not grow up in Britain, with the oxygen value indicating a much warmer climate and other values pointing to an inland limestone area. One suggestion is that he was from southern Spain or the Atlas Mountains region of Morocco, at a time soon after the Reconquista of Islamic Iberia when many Muslims from the former Caliphate of Granada had fled to Morocco. The chemical signatures of other men from the wreck most commonly indicate upbringings in western England, but the archer is a reminder that Henry VIII's army included mercenaries from far afield and that people of African origin were arriving in England in the Tudor period, including the diver Jacques Francis whom we encountered through his deposition in 1548 to the High Court of Admiralty – at work on the
Mary Rose
only two years after the archer had died in the wreck.

A unique discovery in the
Mary Rose
was a walnut chest containing the tools and medicaments of a barber-surgeon, found in a cabin along with many of his belongings and other equipment. Together they comprise the largest assemblage of medical artefacts recovered archaeologically from the Tudor period and are important for representing equipment in use at one point in time – telling us not only about medical practice in general, but also about the provision in a warship, and the status of the surgeon as well. The surgical instruments were of iron and only survived as wooden handles, but are likely to have included scalpels, knives, a bone saw, chisels, scoops, probes, a trepanning tool for drilling into the skull, and cautery irons, heated over a brazier and applied to wounds to stem bleeding. A large urethral syringe could have been used to treat venereal disease with injections of mercury, and iron lancets and a pewter cup for ‘bleeding' a patient. The barber-surgeon was also an apothecary, and the finds included wooden ointment canisters and ceramic medicine jars, some of them from Germany, as well as a bronze mortarium for grinding medicines and a spatula for mixing and spreading ointment – some of which was found already applied to several rolls of fine ‘plaister', showing that he had prepared for the task that lay ahead of him as the battle progressed.