Recovery of the Mary Rose

1982

On 11 October 1982, the hull of the Mary Rose, Henry VIII's flagship, was raised from the seabed of the Solent in one of the most ambitious and celebrated archaeological operations ever undertaken. The ship had sunk during the Battle of the Solent in 1545 while engaging a French invasion fleet, going down within sight of the king himself at Southsea Castle. She lay on the seabed for over four centuries, gradually buried in the silts of the Solent, until her remains were located in 1971. A decade of painstaking excavation followed before the surviving starboard section of the hull was lifted in a specially designed cradle, watched by a television audience of 60 million people worldwide. The Mary Rose was brought to the Historic Dockyard at Portsmouth, where she was placed in a purpose-built hall for conservation. The long process of preserving the waterlogged timbers involved continuous spraying with polyethylene glycol, a waxy substance that gradually replaced the water in the wood. In 2013, a new Mary Rose Museum opened within the dockyard, displaying the ship alongside thousands of artefacts recovered from the wreck, including weapons, personal belongings, tools and the remains of the crew. The museum provides an extraordinarily vivid picture of Tudor life and has become one of the most important attractions in Portsea.