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00:00A true example of a time capsule.
00:03We have objects that just don't survive anywhere else.
00:06The team's work has revealed the fullest ever picture
00:10of what life was like for the men who crewed a Tudor warship.
00:14King Henry VIII's favourite warship.
00:17They have unlocked the secrets of the Mary Rose.
00:44Two 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 are two maritime archaeologists,
01:10Christopher Dobbs and Alex Hildred.
01:13But this is not the first time Christopher and Alex have dived this site.
01:19As archaeology graduates in the late 70s,
01:21they took part in the greatest excavation of a shipwreck the 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
01:34share a love of the Mary Rose that you just can't understand.
01:39You 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,
02:03when, in the early 1970s,
02:05they discovered three ships' timbers protruding from the silt.
02:10It 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.
02:26Named 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.
02:50We 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 and we lose the most significant,
03:03or one of the most significant of our ships, disaster.
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,
03:20a really significant ship with many hundreds of people on board,
03:25going down, sinking in front of the King on South Sea Common here,
03:29watching, crying out, they are drowned like ratons.
03:31To 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.
03:45Although the subject of myth and legend,
03:48no one knew what the Mary Rose looked like.
03:50There were no plans or drawings.
03:52All that remained was a single artist's impression.
03:56Now look at this absolutely beautiful book.
03:59If we open it up, we can see that actually it was presented to King Henry VIII in 1546,
04:06and it's a declaration of the Royal Navy of England, composed by Antony Antony,
04:11one of the officers of the Ordinance.
04:14If we turn the page, we'll find the most important significance for us,
04:18the only illustration we have of the Mary Rose.
04:24What it's depicting is not necessarily the most artistically accurate illustration of a naval ship,
04:30but what it does show is a four-masted sailing vessel bristling with guns.
04:35It shows a main deck and another two rows of guns on top of it.
04:40It's absolutely incredible to be able to look at the illustration of the ship
04:45and to realise 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
04:54and who is also passionate enough to be able to put together
04:58what is undeniably an absolutely beautiful series of illustrations,
05:03giving us the only illustrated inventory of the 16th century.
05:12The divers in the 1970s realised they'd found the skeleton of the Mary Rose.
05:17But how had she survived for so long?
05:21After the Mary Rose sank, she was very, very quickly filled up with silt
05:24because this murky Solent water would come in through the gun ports and the open hatches.
05:29The silt in the water turns into a lovely, like, buttery clay
05:33and it would just build up in the ship, like dust builds up in an attic.
05:38And it was that silt building up inside the ship that actually preserved her.
05:44Initially, they were unsure of what remained of the ship, but the excavation went ahead.
05:49We used something called an airlift.
05:52It's been called an underwater vacuum cleaner.
05:55You would feed the spoil, the silt, up the airlift
05:59and then it would be deposited down tide.
06:03As we dug down and down and down through the silts,
06:06you'd suddenly come across perhaps a bit of a bit of timber.
06:09And it was really exciting because you just didn't know what you were going to find next.
06:14Over a ten-year period, the divers removed the silt.
06:16What they discovered was beyond their wildest dreams.
06:25There, perfectly preserved, was almost half the hull of King Henry's warship.
06:39But the hull was not the only thing the Solent silt had preserved.
06:44Trapped inside the ship, in remarkable condition, were the contents of the Mary Rose.
06:56Drapered alla milake correctweight corps and allсы,
06:57Celts' silt,
07:02asَ
07:03All manner of personal possessions...
07:08And perhaps more poignantly,
07:11the remains of the crew, trapped below deck as the warship sank,
07:16some still wearing the shoes they drowned in while Christopher Dobbs and Alex Hildred were
07:24working on the seabed in the early 1980s up on the deck of the dive vessel was Andy Elkerton
07:30well when I started here I was a fines assistant which was basically receiving the fines when they
07:35came up from the seabed we could giving them their initial identification cleaning them making sure
07:40they were safely packaged up and then get them back onto shore over 19,000 artifacts were raised
07:48from the Mary Rose in 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 each and
08:03every day you can look at them you can see something different you discover something more that takes
08:09you one step further along the way of understanding what life is like in this period of time what you
08:16have here is a true example of a time capsule we have objects that just don't survive anywhere else
08:23it's the things that they dress in it's the things that they own it's the things that they eat from
08:30the things that they drink and in our case literally things that they ate from the remains of the surviving
08:37hull and the artifacts found within it it is now possible to build up a picture of life
08:44aboard the Mary Rose a ship that was shrouded in mystery can now be brought to life
09:04the ship would have been quite crowded you're talking about a crew of over 415 men if you put the
09:10officers retinue on top of that you're probably approximating 500 life on board would have been
09:18pretty grim the ship would have been dark gloomy pretty airless for the most part we're not talking
09:26about a society where showers and baths are the norm and we're certainly not talking about a vessel where
09:33facilities for having a wash of the norm it's clear from the wreck that with no portholes lighting
09:40would have been a serious problem what hadn't been known for sure was how the crew would have seen
09:48below decks until the archaeologists discovered 18 wooden lanterns dispersed around the ship
09:56and even more primitive a wooden candlestick with the remains of a candle
10:03within the dark cramped hull the crew worked and played
10:14we've got a lot of evidence for what the crew did in their spare time we found a lot of
10:18dice on board
10:19tudors were inveterate gamblers on top of a barrel we've got a game nine men's morris
10:25we also found a backgammon set beautiful work of art it is too and for those who could afford it
10:33the coins to gamble with
10:41sometimes the revelation lay in what the archaeologists didn't find
10:49there is no evidence for beds for sleeping that we've recovered from on board the ship you would
10:54expect most people to sleep where they worked if you're a gun crew you slept next to the gun if
11:00you're an ordinary crewman you're jammed into sleeping where you work but then space isn't a consideration
11:06it's a warship while the artifacts give an insight into life on board there was something on the seabed
11:16which would reveal much more about the crew the human remains
11:23the silt which had preserved everything within the mary rose had also entombed 179 individuals
11:31about half of the ship's complement
11:38in an act of symbolism in may 1983 an unknown mariner recovered from the mary rose was laid to rest
11:47in
11:47portsmouth cathedral but what would the bones of the remaining sailors reveal about the men who lived
11:55and died aboard the mary rose it must have been horrendous when the ship was clearly going down and
12:05from the disposition of the bones it's clear that men were fighting to try and get out
12:10dr anne sterland is a forensic anthropologist who has spent much of her life working with the police
12:18in the early 1980s the mary rose trust asked her to look at the human remains found in the ship
12:25the significance of this group of skeletons is it's the only tudor warship crew we have in the whole world
12:32and it allows us access to ordinary people to ordinary men which is really exciting
12:40whenever one works on a group of skeletons from an archaeological site the most thrilling thing about
12:45it is that you're actually touching the people you're not looking at bits of pot you are actually
12:51looking and touching the people and that's what engages me
12:56dr sterland discovered that the 179 individuals were all male predominantly in their early 20s
13:03people often ask me um it's one of the most common questions i'm ever asked is that um
13:10they were much shorter than us weren't they well all the analysis that i did on the bones indicates that
13:16um they were very similar to us they were perhaps a little bit shorter the um average height is five
13:26foot seven five foot seven and a half the bones were to reveal more secrets especially about those who
13:33worked the gun
13:38the back of his spine has got these enormous curved
13:41sticking out bits yes articulations which are gross they're much much bigger than you normally
13:49see them but better still further up um up here in the spine they get even more extreme these these
13:58articulations even more curved and here this one in life that will have been fused he will not
14:08have been able to move that back very much and i wonder if he was uh one of the men
14:13who was involved
14:14with the breech loader you know lifting the that breech block up and down all the time
14:20in order to investigate the health of the crew the bones were compared with a group of young men
14:26buried in a medieval cemetery in norwich the men from norwich had far more pathological changes of a
14:34fairly dramatic nature there was leprosy in the group there was six cases of venereal syphilis in the
14:41group there was tuberculosis in the group there was evidence of dietary deficiency etc on the other
14:48hand the mary rose men were fit and strong and healthy the bones are extremely robust there are no
14:55diseases there's no evidence of leprosy there's no evidence of syphilis one explanation for the
15:02comparative health of the men of the mary rose might be explained by the contents of one of 51 wooden
15:08chests discovered in the warship this chest was the star find of the 1980 diving season because inside
15:17were 64 different objects from syringes and razors to ceramic jars and wooden pots still containing potent
15:24ointments all had once belonged to one of the most important members of the ship's company
15:30the barber surgeon the ordinary soldiers and sailors on the mary rose who were people in the prime of
15:37life and and were the the strongest and fittest soldiers and sailors in the nation by and large
15:44they would not in a day-to-day life have the services of a barber surgeon so it was seen
15:50as a
15:50reassurance to the crew that they had a surgeon on board to tend to their wounds and their general health
16:00the barber surgeon's role varied hugely from amputations and the extraction of bullets and
16:06arrows in warfare to the more obscure like the letting of blood a common practice in the 16th century
16:13for over energetic young men he was even responsible for the pulling of teeth
16:25some of the instruments in the surgeon's chest were quite horrendous included amongst these were an
16:32array of syringes there was a urethral syringe for administration of mercury for the french pox
16:38uh we always called our nasty diseases after our enemies and some ironstone jars which had some
16:47medicines in them greasy pastes made probably out of goose grease or or pig's grease or whatever and
16:54often these were used to cover a wound to help the healing or if there was a canker or cancer
17:00they
17:01they would use something that was called a digestive which actually ate into the cancer the problem is
17:06of course is that it ate into everything
17:16there is no record of the name of the barber surgeon but a black velvet hat found within the
17:22chest is exactly the same as those in a picture of henry the eighth with the guild of barber surgeons
17:28painted just four years before the mary rose sank it 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 only one person the vice admiral george
17:52crew can be named with any degree of certainty however it's just possible that we may know the name of
18:00another member of the crew
18:04one of the ordinary wooden bowls recovered from the wreck has some words carved around its base
18:10nye coop cook was this the personal bowl of the mary roses cook and how did he cook on a
18:19ship made of wood
18:26beneath the naval dockyards in portsmouth is stored something which would help the archaeologists to find out
18:41this is where we've got the logs that we found on board the mary rose we actually found 776 of
18:48these logs
18:51it just shows part you know how fantastically well preserved some of the things are in the ship we can
18:57even see the the bark of the birch tree from 437 years ago which i think is absolutely stunning to
19:05see
19:05something in that good condition this was firewood extraordinary as it might seem the tudors were
19:12using fires on board a wooden ship to cook with and with logs of over four feet in length they
19:18were not
19:18small affairs while diving in the hold of the mary rose the team uncovered a pile of tudor bricks which
19:28weighed over five tons but this was not ballast these were the remains of the ship's ovens if you look
19:38at the uh historical records for the may rose it has these obscure references to a cauldron in furnace
19:44set in lime and brick and nobody really knew what that was but what we actually found underwater was
19:51that it was exactly that from the location of the bricks and brass cauldrons found deep in the hold of
19:57the ship the archaeologists have been able to construct a picture of what the mary roses galley might have
20:03looked like and from this work out how they would have cooked animal bones found on board suggest the food
20:17the crew may have been eating in their last few days meat was in abundance beef and pork as well
20:24as fish
20:24and even a haunch of venison what looks at first sight like a fairly crude cooking arrangement is
20:32basically just a cauldron set above a brick oven can actually be used to cook in a variety of different
20:38ways you could cook just a a basic broth perhaps for the crew but in that you could cook different
20:45things they could have bags like muslin bags that would hold enough meat and peas for one whole mess of
20:53people that's his eight eight ten or twelve people and then in front of the oven using the radiant heat
20:59from the far we could cook on normal pottery or iron cooking pots that we actually found and it's
21:07actually shown that this was really a very sophisticated cooker like a modern day aga but with a great big
21:12cauldron and it wasn't just a crude cooking range
21:19the menu wasn't just meat there would have been greens and peas and even methods of making the food
21:26taste a little better a pepper grinder and peppercorns were also discovered in the wreck
21:35there were even clues about how they ate scattered throughout the ship
21:41we have this vast amount of eating and drinking materials belonging to ordinary people the general
21:47crew that were on board the ship it's quite unusual to find such a large amount of ordinary plates bowls
21:55dishes because these are the sort of things come the end of their life they're thrown away or they're
22:00just rot away over the ages after the food was transferred to their own individual bowl or plate
22:10the the tudor seamen would have really just used that their own knives and their fingers forks hadn't
22:16been brought into english society at that stage and spoons would be reserved for people of a higher status
22:23you notice that the plates have markings from knives where they've been used to cut food
22:28but the bowls don't so the bowls weren't used for eating with their knives and where there's food
22:35there's drink most of the crew would have drunk beer and at that time the the ration was about a
22:41gallon
22:41of beer a day eight points which sounds great to us but it would have been very very much watered
22:47down
22:47beer and used because it was just so much more healthy than water because fewer bugs would grow in
22:52it because the yeast grows and produce the beer the officers would have drunk wine and they would
23:01have eaten in a much more refined way their food would have been taken to them and served from a
23:06dresser
23:07onto their pewter plates
23:14we've got an amazing collection of pewter on board the mary rose and some of it actually has the
23:20initials gc which could be george carew who was the vice admiral on board so it seems that he brought
23:26his own dinner service to the ship so that he could eat off that and uh that was very very
23:32different to
23:33how the crewette the officers had one other added extra with their meals music
23:51music in tudor times would be a bit it's similar to the way we listen to a radio it's a
23:56wonderful
23:56thing you can sing along to music you can dance to music a number of musical instruments were found in
24:03different parts of the ship but one discovered by the divers intrigued them much more than the others
24:08they had found a long lost instrument the still or quiet shawm the discovery of the shawm was of
24:16immense importance to those who study 16th century musical instruments it was described as the most
24:24mysterious instrument of the middle ages and the renaissance every book and musical instruments mentioned
24:32it but said probably we would never know what it sounded like but charles foster was asked to see
24:41whether he could make a copy of the shawm and more importantly see whether he could recreate a sound
24:47from the past it's very heavy wood boxwood all the component parts of it were there all the key work
24:56and the finger hole section was in remarkably fine conditions it could be copied with some with a very
25:04great degree of certainty six months later charles foster had pieced together the clues the shawm was found
25:12in a case which is very useful way of making it more portable on board ship but the two parts
25:20fit together
25:22and a brass tube was found in the bell section which fits this end and a reed goes right into
25:32it
25:34and it produces an instrument which plays very low down
25:45the loud shawm developed into the modern oboe but the still shawm became obsolete the only example was
25:53found on the mary rose
26:02by the autumn of 1982 divers had spent over 10 years excavating the hull of the mary rose
26:09and brought to the surface nearly 19 000 artifacts
26:15but there was one last thing to be raised
26:18at 280 tons it was the biggest of them all the 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
26:49in the morning
26:50on october the 11th 1982 60 million television viewers worldwide watched as she broke the surface
26:57at three minutes past nine in the morning what an amazing
27:01so um this is a wonderful moment you hear all the sirens ringing and i should think probably the navy
27:08will get in on the act it has the gun has gone off at south sea obscured by a huge
27:15metal support cradle
27:17and still lying on her side king henry's warship was coming home in 1982 i was one of the salvage
27:25diving
27:25team and i was privileged to be underwater when the may rose first came to the surface and i was
27:31doing
27:31a job filling up some of the airbags that we used to cushion the wreck and it was amazing to
27:36have been
27:36there on the day that she came to the surface and it's certainly something i'll never forget
27:41it had taken four years to prepare her for raising it had taken many hours to reach the surface
27:48and it nearly ended in catastrophe
27:55a corner of the lifting frame had collapsed thankfully the hull was intact
28:05437 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
28:38she is 22 years into a preservation program which will take a further 11 years to complete
28:47for more than a decade the ship was sprayed constantly with chilled water to prevent the
28:52wood from drying out and cracking now she is being sprayed with a special solution called peg which
28:59penetrates the timbers replacing the water with wax it's a 24-hour seven day a week process
29:11just occasionally the sprays are switched off giving the archaeologists like christopher dobbs
29:17time to inspect the ship he helped raise
29:22then up here we can see where we've marked those three timbers with the orange tags those were the
29:27first timbers that the divers saw in 1971 underwater and from those then everything else here was uncovered
29:35by the divers by hand during the excavation and that just shows what a herculean task it was
29:43right underneath the mary rose under the starboard side of the stern and towering above us is the
29:48bulk of the mary rose and from this area we can get an impression of the ship's lines the very
29:54fine lines
29:55of the ship but also underneath the ship here we can get some of the impression of the repairs that
30:01were
30:01done during the life of the ship so up here we've got one repair piece there it's actually a patch
30:07that has been let into the timbers of the ship at some time during the ship's life
30:14up on the main gun deck towards the stern of the ship they were to discover the cabin of the
30:20mary
30:20roses carpenter he had a large cabin which he even made bigger during his time on board the ship he
30:27extended it and the ship's carpenter might feel like a just a normal trade but actually he was a
30:33very very important professional because if there were any problems on board a wooden ship you'd have
30:37to send for the the carpenter a bit like how a chief engineer is so important on a warship today
30:45the carpenter and his mates would have maintained the ship everything from mending rigging blocks to
30:51repairing damage made by cannonballs during battle you're in a wooden society it's a wooden ship
30:59everything's made from wood so a carpenter's got some status on board the ship he has his own cabin
31:05but also within the cabin we found a chest it was full of tools they're not unusual they're tools that
31:11i
31:11see in my own dad's shed you look at it and initially you think it can't possibly be tudor but
31:17then you
31:18decide it is mallets planes and hammers the tools of the trade but other belongings in his cabin confirm
31:26the carpenter's status on board there are pewter objects now pewter is just not affordable by somebody
31:33who doesn't have the money it tells us he is a man of some wealth he's a man who aspires
31:39lying close to
31:41the door of the carpenter's cabin was a wooden tankard painted on its lid were latin words which would
31:47give an insight into the faith of the crew sit deus nobiscum quid contra nos which is a quote from
31:56romans 8 and it means if god is with us who can be against us and we've got quite a
32:01few of these
32:02illustrations of uh religion and people's beliefs on board the wreck so we've got that on the tankard
32:09but then we've also got book book covers um again quite amazing to find something like book covers on a
32:15shipwreck um and they're all all drawn here but some of them actually have um sayings again like this
32:22verbum domini manit in aternum the word of the lord lasts forever these embellished book covers with
32:31their religious inscriptions were almost certainly owned by officers only officers would have been able
32:38to afford them or literate enough to read them
32:48this was a time of intense religious turmoil henry the eighth had broken with rome over his divorce
32:55of catherine of aragon catholicism was being suppressed
33:03and yet on the mary rose it seems to be catholic faith that was very much in evidence
33:12eight complete sets of rosary beads were found some perfectly preserved
33:21it's fascinating to get this sort of insight into the religious upheaval at the time because in 1547
33:29the whole practice of using rosaries was was uh frowned upon in an injunction and if uh lay people
33:35were caught using them they had to be warmed by the clergy so to get glimpses into this very very
33:41great upheaval in religion in europe at one time is quite stunning
33:48the religious changes in england had angered henry's catholic enemies in europe dangerous times lay ahead
33:56king henry embarked on a massive armament program this picture the cowdray engraving is a contemporary
34:05image of the day the mary rose sank off portsmouth while engaging with the french fleet on the shore henry's
34:13soldiers are armed with medieval pike staffs bills and swords but here too are the latest handguns cannon
34:22and other weapons of the coming age
34:27the famous english longbow would soon be gone forever
34:41the longbow had been the supreme weapon of war in medieval europe but none were thought to have
34:47survived into modern times until in 1979 one bow was found in the hold of the mary rose
34:56soon after christopher dobbs discovered a chest full of them each made from a single piece of you
35:02averaging over six feet in length
35:10by the end of the diving they would have found nearly three quarters of the longbows known to have
35:15been carried on the ship
35:19we're in one of the storage areas at the mary rose trust and here we have a selection
35:22of some of the 172 complete longbows that were recovered from the wreck
35:27these are really the only only examples we have of the weapons that made the english longbowmen feared
35:33by in particular by the french and and in fact won things like the the battle of agincourt and crecy
35:38or even only 60 years before the mary rose the famous battle of towton the longbow is a fantastic
35:46fantastically designed weapon and it's really almost sad to think that these very very beautiful things
35:50were actually meant to kill or maim people it was not only bows which were found in the wreck
35:57in a particularly delicate condition they found arrows we've got about 2300 complete arrows most of
36:07them about 75 percent of those tested show to be poplar but um ash birch beech oak are also used
36:16within the assemblage at the very end of all of the arrows there is some evidence for the binding
36:21and here you can see the green which is actually the glue that's the remnants of the glue now
36:27interestingly that green color we've had the arrows tested and the green color is actually very very
36:32high in copper and when when the arrow is tested both from from the tip to the very from the
36:39flight we
36:39also picked up although you can't see it because of the black staining of the iron quite a high
36:44percentage of copper here so it means copper glue was used for the iron head as well as for the
36:49the flights and that is interesting because the french were accusing the english of poisoning the
36:55tips of their arrows and in fact copper if it goes into a wound will actually cause huge infection
37:00and so that might be the reason why whether it was deliberate or whether that's just the glue that
37:04was used is still an unknown biological warfare of yesteryear perhaps but war at sea was turning away
37:12from the more traditional combat and heading towards a more long distance fighting although the picture
37:19of the mary rose in the anthony role might not be accurate the detailed inventory of the weapons she
37:24carried is now not only does the inventory which is extremely detailed list the type of guns but it
37:31also lists the number and the type of shot and we can understand that if we look at the section
37:35on the
37:36guns at the top we have cannons the largest guns and then demi cannons slings demi slings quarter slings
37:41fowlers base pieces top pieces hail shot pieces the problem was that no one knew what the names meant
37:50the 39 cannon carried on the mary rose were the ultimate status symbol to show the wealth and power
37:57of king henry the archaeologists were to raise 25 of them finally they were able to unlock a centuries
38:07old puzzle and actually measure the power of the cannon and guns previously known simply as words inscribed
38:14on tudor parchment now we can begin to understand what these guns actually are and then we get some
38:22idea about the power of the mary rose as a fighting ship and then by inference of the fleet as
38:27a
38:27whole and that gives us some ability to look at tactics we're at the time when we have the capability
38:33and for the first time of long-range warfare so you're beginning to not have to see the person that
38:40you're going to annihilate you've got the capability now with a num sheer number of large guns you can
38:45you can put on a ship to actually inflict damage far enough away to not be able to see the
38:50people that
38:51you're doing it now we do it on the other side of the world we do it in space but
38:54this is a very
38:55very important time because it's the beginning of the of the sanitization if you like of killing by
39:00not having to get that close among the technological advances of the mary rose were the opening gun
39:07ports ironically it was these which would prove to be her downfall left open while she engaged the french
39:16it's thought a sharp turn sent water pouring through onto the gun decks capsizing the ship and sending
39:22her to the bottom
39:30august 2004 and the mary rose trust have learnt that a proposed deep water channel into portsmouth will
39:36pass dangerously close to the protected wreck site so for the first time since the ship's hull was
39:43dramatically raised from the seabed archaeologists are back excavating and looking for evidence in
39:49areas which weren't investigated in the original dive during the 1970s and 80s the archaeologists
39:58didn't excavate the bow castle structure the area at the front of the ship built up high so that they
40:03could fight a land battle at sea historians have only been able to guess at what the front of the
40:09mary
40:10rose might have looked like i think this bow area of the ship because it's one of the fighting areas
40:15of the ship is actually very very important and that's why you know i still dream of trying to find
40:21this underwater along with alex hildred christopher dobbs is one of four original mary rose team members
40:32who will be diving this summer
40:38they will be working underwater in 90 minute shifts
40:48and just as 20 years ago they start removing layers of silt in the hope that they will discover
40:54more treasures from the mary rose
40:58it's not long before discoveries are made you're not all the finds on this diver tudor
41:04we're getting objects that were left behind by us 20 years ago a pair of fins a raybone chesterman tape
41:09measure and my favorites is this it looks like something very corroded and very old but it's actually
41:16just one of these an adjustable wrench that's been in the sea for a bit longer and this just shows
41:23quite how
41:24much things corrode underwater and really how lucky we are to have had the mary rose preserved under those
41:29silts the silts are still kind to the mary rose and before long they begin to give up more objects
41:38a length of timber at first sight like many others previously discovered
41:45but further excavation reveals that this particular piece of wood is of far greater significance than the
41:52divers had ever hoped for could this timber be part of a bigger find that of the front of the
42:00vessel
42:00roger we can see something with your hat camera
42:07we found a substantial timber it's five meters long and over 750 wide at its widest point and we began
42:14to
42:15see frames coming out of it and if we look at the skeleton view from the inside we believe actually
42:20to be
42:20this portion here so it's basically the bottom of the bow as it begins to curve up
42:26what they are looking for is the bow castle the front part of the ship her fighting platform
42:39over the next few days the team of 12 divers search for more timbers hidden in the mud
42:47as the diving continues more and more are emerging i'm just astounded by how many timbers are exposed
42:54there um i wasn't sure that we would see that much in the battle but there is there is tons
42:59down there
43:00there's lots of um loose timbers that have come eroded but they're on top of really nice uh conditioned
43:06timbers that have probably just fallen off the wreck and i think when um we start opening up the starboard
43:12side carpet in the bow i think i think we'll find a gold mine for archaeologists in terms of uh
43:18what
43:19there could be of the bow structures much of the wood is too big to raise but smaller pieces are
43:26traced
43:27measured and photographed and stored on board ship for later conservation we've been out here for 10 days
43:34now and what we're finding is that in the lower levels we're getting rather eroded timbers like this
43:39that might have a few features like tunnel holes but what's most encouraging is that in the deeper
43:45levels we're getting really good and important tudor timbers this one is a very very nice all-op deck
43:51plank you can see it's the the elm is sort of almost glowing and it's very very nicely uh rebated
43:57away
43:57here probably to take one of the um diagonal braces that we've got in the ship so that's a very
44:03very
44:03special all-op deck plank and this is in addition to all the major uh frame timbers of the ship
44:08but
44:09what's particularly nice i mean this is my favorite that we've got so far we've had other examples
44:15before is this wonderful molded piece of outside planking from the bow castle and you can see this
44:22lovely molded shape and those were high up in the bow castle and were quite decorative ports they could
44:28have fired out of them but they also looked good too it's not just timbers which convinced the divers
44:34they are in the right place for the bow castle a small hand-carved tudor cannonball on the sea floor
44:40is just what alex hildred is looking for the very exciting thing about this is it's exactly of the
44:47right size for guns that are listed in the antony role as being on the mary rose but which we
44:52haven't
44:52got and which we would expect because of their size to be positioned in the bow castle so there's a
44:56shot for a bow castle gun if you like and the next one although it's it's much smaller it's equally
45:01important and we've got about three of these now it's actually a lead shot but it's got a tiny little
45:06iron dice in it which means that it's eccentric and it spins which means you get greater range and
45:10accuracy and these were for the anti-personnel guns that were situated high in the bow castle and the
45:15stern castle so again directly associated with our bow castle structure it's mid-august and time has
45:22run out for the team more than 40 large timbers relating to the bow have been discovered while
45:29the smaller pieces of wood can be taken ashore the larger sections are covered up again on the seabed
45:35until another time for their importance is so great that the team now hope to obtain funding for future
45:42dives to raise and conserve them possibly reuniting them with the hull of the mary rose
45:49timbers i was not actually certain that we'd find anything under there i knew that there would be
45:54you know a few eroded timbers but 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 you know sound mary rose bow timbers and i think
46:07that we may found more of this bow castle this forward end of the ship that's eluded us so far
46:14that's it since 1971 when the first few timbers were discovered archaeologists have spent over 12 man years
46:22on the seabed