Mary Rose

Mary Rose

The second day in Portsmouth we headed back to the Historic Dockyard to visit the remaining attractions contained within in the admission price including a harbour tour,  the Royal Navy national museum, action stations and some more which I will let you check out when you visit.

The main agenda of the day and first point of call was to visit the Mary Rose Museum and see what had been raised from the Solent and the conservation work. 

As Henry VIII’s favourite ship, the Mary Rose was one of the earliest ships built in Portsmouth between 1509 and 1511 to carry heavy guns on the orders of King and became the flagship of the fleet. She carried two types of guns, bronze guns which were muzzle-loaders and wrought iron breech loading guns. She was also armed with many different types of shot for different purposes such as stone, lead or iron for destroying hulls, spike shots for destroying rigging and scattering shot which was iron dice or flakes of flints in canisters and this was used to take out the opposing crew. She was also carrying longbows and arrows

During skirmishes with the French fleet on 19th July, 1545 she capsizes in the Solent where she remained until 1971 despite several failed attempts to salvage her. In 1836 her resting place was rediscovered by John and Charles Deane who recovered items which included guns. After raising the hull in 1994 they spray it with a water soluble wax polyethylene glycol to protect the wood by penetrating it and preserving it for all time. 

The National Lottery in 2008 gave £21 million to build a permanent museum for the public to visit and you can see the timbers of the hull being carefully dried which will continue until 2017. Again this is another great place to visit especially considering they have found over 19,000 objects protected in silt for over 430 years. Many of these are in excellent condition and can be found in the museum on display including leather shoes, cutlery and skeletons of crew, archers and a dog.  A selection of the photographs taken is below.