The Mary Rose was a large warship in the Tudor Navy of King Henry VIII. She was the second most powerful ship in King Henry VIII’s fleet and a favourite of the king. For three decades she participated in several wars against France, Scotland, and Brittany, until her sinking in 1545 during the Battle of the Solent off the south coast of England. Almost all of the Mary Rose crew, up to 500 men, drowned.
Several attempts were made to salvage the sunken ship soon after it sank. However, the ship had settled deep into the soft muddy seabed of the Solent where it would remain for the next four hundred years. It was eventually raised in 1982 in one of the most ambitious and costly maritime salvage operations ever undertaken. The excavation and raising of the Mary Rose was a milestone in the field of maritime archaeology, comparable in complexity and cost to the raising of the 17th-century Swedish warship Vasa in 1961.
The Mary Rose by Geoff Hunt. Image credit: Mary Rose Trust
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