The Mary Rose was sunk by a cannonball fired from a French ship but new evidence suggests this fact was hushed up by Henry VIII in a fine example of Tudor political spin.

According to a new documentary to be screened on The History Channel on November 24 all the other theories put forward to explain the sinking of King Henry VIII’s pride and joy are flawed.

University of Portsmouth geographer Dr Dominic Fontana is one of a team of experts whose new theory will be showcased in the UK premiere television programme called ‘What really sunk the Mary Rose’.

Dr Fontana said the crew of the ship would not have been incompetent, as previous studies suggest, nor did the ship sink because she was caught by a gust of wind while tacking under full sail. Instead, he is convinced the ship carried the best available crew of professional sailors and some of these men bravely battled against incoming water when the French blew a hole in her side.

What happened next was an artful piece of political spin, according to the programme makers, who said the French were not credited with sinking the Mary Rose because by claiming instead the ship was toppled by wind and an incompetent crew the navy’s supremacy was maintained, Henry VIII’s pride remained intact and the French were unable to claim the victory.

Dr Fontana said: “The Mary Rose was holed by French gunfire received from an advance party of fast, oar-powered galleys which were heavily armed. She would have quickly taken quite a quantity of water into her hull before she manoeuvred to bring a broadside of guns to bear on the attacking French galleys.”

That fateful manoeuvre to put her in a position so that her guns could be unleashed on the French was her undoing because the sudden movement of water in the hold caused her to capsize and sink with the loss of more than 400 lives.

“The water in her hold would have had significant effect on her handling and her stability would have been severely compromised,” Dr Fontana said. “The additional weight of water would also have pushed her open gunports closer to the waterline than they should have been, making disaster inevitable once the sea flowed rapidly in through them. It was the same effect that sunk the cross-channel ferry the Herald of Free Enterprise off Zeebrugge in March 1987.”

Skeletal remains were found in the hold and some of these are thought to have been the carpenters desperately working in the dark trying to plug the hole made by the cannonball.

The experts suggest the Mary Rose may have been attempting to run aground on Spitbank, a shallow sandbar 600m ahead of where she sank. The 34-year-old ship was one of England’s best and serious attempts to save her would have been made.

Dr Fontana’s research involved studying the ‘Cowdray Engraving’ which is a large picture recording many of the events that happened during the battle of the Solent on July 19, 1545. The original Tudor painting, from which the engraving was made, once adorned the wall of the dining parlour at Cowdray House in Sussex but it was lost when Cowdray House caught fire in 1793. Dr Fontana used advanced Geographical Information Systems technology to create a map from the engraving which revealed the positions of each of the ships involved in the action. He then integrated this data with tidal currents hour by hour over the period of the battle.

“Changing currents are crucial to our understanding of the tactics which may have been employed by both the French and the English. The GIS brings all of this information together so that it becomes possible to determine the potential movements of individual vessels.

“The Mary Rose was hit by French gunfire and despite valiant efforts being made by her crew she capsized just one mile from Southsea Castle from where King Henry VIII was watching the battle. Those onshore would not have known anything about flooding in the hull caused by a French hit on the ship and it would have appeared as though she had been caught by a freak gust of wind and blown over. They would have seen what looked like a fully intact Mary Rose suddenly sink. The French damage to the hull would have been relatively slight but it was a fatal wound.”

Source

Hmmm.  Well, the Mary Rose was pretty much the first of her kind in the English navy.  A new design needing new tactics and new sailing techniques.  Earlier ships mostly didn’t even concentrate on guns, they were just used to carry a bunch of soldiers who would then board enemy ships.  Cannon were an afterthought, with just a few scattered around the ship; the main fighting tactics were the same ones that the Romans used against Carthage.  The only ships purposefully made with a guns in mind at the time of the Mary Rose were galleys that had a small number of long guns mounted along the length of the ship to fire out the front, rather than a large number of smaller guns mounted broadside.

So even the most experienced crew would be “incompetent” in that there would be nobody who really knew what the ship would do or what to do with it (this was back when shipbuilding and ship handling was determined by trial and error, rather than calculations and engineering).  And she was re-designed midway through in such a way as to make her ride a lot lower in the water than anticipated.  She was a top-heavy ship that rode low in the water with lots of openings in the side not far above the waterline.  All it would take is for the ship to heel over at enough of an angle and there would be problems.

The original story that it was a combination of an inexperienced (not necessarily incompetent) crew making a sudden maneuver in a strong wind does work.  There have been tests and models done of it, and the results match the theory and also the eyewitness accounts.  There doesn’t need to be any additional factor for such a ship to sink in that manner in that situation.  It’s possible that battle damage did contribute, yes, but while all available information supports the accidental capsizing theory, there’s not really any additional evidence to support the new theory that battle damage contributed to it.  Nor is there ever likely to be, what with half the ship missing and nothing like video or photos of the event to be found forgotten in some vault.

It kinda surprises me that as close to shore as they were, and as precise her sinking location was noted, that she hadn’t been salvaged way before now.  The cannon work and such alone would have made such an endeavor worthwhile, at least closely following her sinking.

DavePrime - 23 November 2008 08:05 PM

It kinda surprises me that as close to shore as they were, and as precise her sinking location was noted, that she hadn’t been salvaged way before now.  The cannon work and such alone would have made such an endeavor worthwhile, at least closely following her sinking.

It was the mid-16th century.  Scuba gear was a tad scarce at the time. . .

And for a good many years, the wreck was covered over with silt.  The Solent isn’t exactly crystal-clear water with a nice smooth rock bottom.  It wasn’t until fairly recently that it could be found using sonar, much less recovered.