Monday 25 August 2014

Sabbatical Blog 11: The Mary Rose

Ray Anglesea shares the next installment of his sabbatical experiences

One of the joys of spending a long weekend with dear friends in Portsmouth was a visit to see The Mary Rose; one of Henry VIII’s great ships, now housed in the new Mary Rose Museum located just metres way from Nelson's flagship, HMS Victory and the ships of the modern Royal Navy.

Sometime in the late afternoon on July 19th 1545, the Mary Rose heeled to starboard and sank whilst engaging a French invasion fleet larger than the Spanish Armada 43 years later. Centuries later the Tudor ship captured the world's imagination when she was raised from the seabed in 1982; the Flagship is the only sixteenth century warship on display anywhere in the world. The excavation and salvage of the Mary Rose was a milestone in the field of maritime archaeology. The surviving section of the ship and 19,000 thousand recovered artifacts are of immeasurable value as a Tudor-era time capsule. 

As fascinating as Henry VIII’s naval war machine was the building in which she is housed in is of considerable architectural interest too. The £27million museum opened in 2012, an elliptical timber-clad building designed by London office Wilkinson Eyre Architects and built over a late18th Century Dry Dock listed as a Scheduled Ancient Monument. It was designed with a stained black exterior, intended to reference traditional English boat sheds of the time, and a disc-shaped metal roof that curves up over its elliptical body.

The new boat-shaped Museum showcases the very best of 21st century architecture and construction, where for the first time visitors can see the starboard section of the ship's hull with its preserving sprays switched off and the final phase of the hull's conservation through internal windows in 3 different stories. The interiors were designed to recreate the dark and claustrophobic atmosphere found below a ship's deck. Spaces feature low ceilings and are kept deliberately dark, with lighting directed only onto exhibits and handrails so that visitors can find their way through the galleries.

Following the painstaking archaeological excavation and recording of the exact location of every find, the project team reunited the original contents - fittings, weaponry, armament and possessions – deck-by-deck. A virtual hull was constructed to represent the missing port side with all the guns on their original gun carriages, cannonballs, gun furniture, stores, chests, rope and rigging. Visitors to the Museum walk in between the conserved starboard section of the hull and the virtual hull on three levels, seeing all the main shipboard material in context as though they are on board the Mary Rose.

The end galleries interpret the context gallery deck-by-deck in more conventional museum display cases.  In them are to be found the most comprehensive collection of Tudor artefacts in the world from personal belongings such as wooden bowls, leather shoes, musical instruments and nit combs complete with 500 year old lice to ship's objects such as longbows and two tonne guns. For the first time, using forensic science, crew members have been brought to life giving visitors the chance to come face-face with the carpenter, cook, archer and even the ship's dog, 'Hatch'!  The complete conservation of the Mary Rose will be finished in 2016, when she will be fully integrated with the new museum environment.

As I walked around this fascinating museum a verse from St. Luke’s gospel came to my mind “For there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open.” Chapter 8 and v17.  The Tudor warship that long lay buried in the silts of the Solent has revealed its secrets. For some the idea of disturbing and investigating a maritime grave might appear distasteful - involving huge risks. To uncover what has been carefully concealed, to exhume what time and forgetting has claimed for its own is to risk bringing to light truths that could comprehensively shatter the peace of the day. The exhumations of human remains are complex archaeological issues. An engraved slab of Welsh slate in Portsmouth Cathedral marks the resting place of an unknown member of the ship’s company, who was interred with respect and dignity and one of the 500 who perished when the ship went down. Every year, on the Sunday before the anniversary of the sinking of the Mary Rose, an act of remembrance including the laying of a wreath is held at the Mary Rose grave.

Whatever the ethics of archaeological investigations out of the Solent’s silent world has come some of the treasures of the Tudor world, the leather shoe, a rosary bead, long bows, bottles, coins and part of the doomed ship itself. The memory of the crew of the Mary Rose has also been brought back to life every time a person views or holds the small treasures that the divers had salvaged. The happenings of that past day in 1545 are now laid bare in a beautiful and inspiring naval museum. Today we re-enter relationships with what has been buried.

The artefacts that are recovered, and the stories that go with them, are memorials to the souls of the dead. In effect, each artefact, becomes a meaningful memorial, a testimony to the reality of the lives of those who sailed aboard the historic ship, the Mary Rose.

Ray Anglesea
Sabbatical Blog 11: The Mary Rose, Portsmouth.
June 2014

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