- Dr Hugh Montgomery examines humans remains at the Mary Rose Trust Photo: CHANNEL 5
August 4, 2008
The Mary Rose, the flagship of Henry VIII’s navy, may have sunk because most of the crew didn’t speak English and couldn’t understand their officers’ orders. Using archaeological remains and archival records, scientists have determined that the ship was largely manned by foreign sailors, thought to be either mercenaries or Spanish prisoners of war.
Forty-three before the Spanish Armada threatened England with invasion, King Francis I of France sent a fleet of more than 200 ships to capture the Isle of Wight in the English Channel. The French invasion of 1545 failed, but not before the Mary Rose sank. More than 400 crew members died making it one of Britain’s worst naval disasters.
Historians believe the Mary Rose sank when ship turned sharply and leaned over, allowing water to pour through the open gun ports. Why the crew failed to close the gun ports has been enduring mystery.
Archaeologists raised the remaining section of the Mary Rose from the seabed in 1982. Thousands of artifacts, including ten thousand bones, were recovered from the site. With the aid of forensic science, those bones are now telling their stories of how the crewmen lived and died.
Professor Hugh Montgomery from the University College London and a team of forensic scientists and osteoarchaeologists were given permission by the Mary Rose Trust to examine the remains of eighteen crew members.
The scientists were able to roughly determine where the crew members grew up by analyzing the chemical composition of their teeth. This is possible because, as teeth develop, they retain water molecules consumed during childhood.
Using a mass spectrometer, Dr. Lynne Bell and Professor Julia Lee-Thorp measured the ratio of oxygen isotopes in the water molecules from the men’s teeth. Heavier oxygen isotopes indicate a warmer climate. The tests revealed that eleven of the eighteen men could not have grown up in Britain and probably came from southern Europe.
Scientists then matched the forensic evidence with an account in Henry VIII’s state papers. In the year before the Mary Rose sank, nine ships carrying six hundred Spanish soldiers were caught in a storm in the English Channel. They took refuge in Falmouth Harbour in Cornwall. Running out of money and starving, they were pressed into service for England. It’s possible that some of these men were among those on the Mary Rose.
The new theory also helps explain the last words of the Mary Rose’s commander, Vice Admiral George Carew. Shortly before his ship sank, Carew shouted to another English ship that his men were, “Knaves I cannot rule.”
In fact, 60 percent of the crew might not have understood Carew’s commands to close the gun ports as the ship attempted a quick maneuver.
The full story of how scientists made these new discoveries will be told in a television documentary, Ghosts of the Mary Rose, airing on Britain’s Channel Five network at 8pm on Tuesday the 5th of August. The findings will also be detailed in paper to be published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.
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One Comment
One does start to ask the question - didn’t or didn’t want to?