David Childs (1)

Inspired by a question about ship masts, I picked up another book off my wish list. I guiltily confess that I thought the Mary Rose had sunk on her maiden voyage; in my defense, it turns out that just about everybody did (including one of the directors of the Mary Rose Trust). In fact, the Mary Rose had a fairly long career, launched in 1510 and capsizing in action against the French in the Solent on July 19, 1545. (Perhaps the “maiden voyage” people are confusing her with the Vasa? Or maybe the Titanic?)

I also guiltily confess that, for somebody with an interest in the Tudors, I didn’t really know very much about Henry VIII, other than the usual stuff about his relationship problems. This book is as much about Henry’s reign as it is about the Mary Rose, since the two were strangely linked (Henry came to the throne in 1509, a year before the Mary Rose was launched as part of his naval program; he died in 1547, two years after she capsized). The seventeen-year-old Henry became king almost simultaneously with three other young rulers: Francis I of France at nineteen in 1515; Charles I of Spain and V of the Holy Roman Empire at fifteen in 1515, and Süleiman the Magnificent at 25 in 1520. Henry fancied himself a great warrior, and declared war on France almost immediately; but his wars were of limited success, and were it not for Anne Boleyn he would have been an obscure ruler of a peripheral and unimportant country, overshadowed by his three near-contemporaries.

That’s one of the things that made this book interesting; the linked careers of Henry VIII and the Mary Rose are discussed almost without mention of the divorces, the beheadings, and the dissolution of the Church. Instead we see Henry messing around in France, scoring minor victories (the capture of Boulogne) but nearly bankrupting England in the process. He did, however, begin the Royal Navy; previous kings had a few ships that were their personal property, but under Henry was apparently the first to send ships to sea flying the St. George’s Cross of England in addition to the royal arms plus the Tudor livery of green and white horizontal stripes, making for a colorful if not tasteful display.

A lot of things about the Mary Rose are different enough from later ships to be intriguing. She was a carrack, and thus had four masts instead of the more familiar three. (The fourth mast was called the bonadventure mizzenmast; I have no idea why). Square sails (made of hemp, rather than canvas) on the main and fore; lateen rigs on the two rear masts, fighting tops on all masts (including two on the mainmast) and immense fore and stern castles. (In answer to the original mast question, the masts were central spindles of spruce or pine surrounded by oak). The Mary Rose was steered with a tiller rather than a wheel; it must have been very long to get enough leverage to move the rudder; thus the helmsman must have gotten a lot of exercise running around if the ship was engaged in violent maneuvers. An interesting drawing called my attention to something I hadn’t realized before: ships’ “knees”, the elbow-shaped timbers that join the deck to the ribs, require oak trees with large branches to get the natural wood shape. These trees grow best isolated or at the edge of a wood – the tree can spread its branches out if there are no other trees nearby competing for sunlight. I wonder if woods were deliberately set up this way?

Nautical tactics hadn’t changed very much from the Middle Ages; ships closed, archers on the castles pelted the other ships with arrows, they grappled, and soldiers stormed aboard – sort of a seagoing gang fight. The crew seems to have had a fairly rigid caste system; while later ships had officers and sailors, with maybe a sprinkling of marines, the Mary Rose and her contemporaries had officers, sailors, soldiers and gunners. Apparently sailors didn’t work the guns or board enemy ships, soldiers didn’t work the ship or guns, and gunners didn’t sail or fight. The gunner still had a lot to do, the one thing that had changed from the Middle Ages was armament. The Mary Rose had artillery sticking out of every available space – at her last battle she had one falcon, two cannons, two demicannon, two culverins, six demiculverins, two sakers, three demislings, twelve port pieces, two slings, a quarter sling, six fowlers, thirty bases, two top pieces, and twenty hail shot pieces for a total of 91 guns. Since each of these had a different bore, ammunition supply must have been a nightmare; in fact the Mary Rose carried about sixteen rounds per gun. Her strongly curved sides and the difficulty of training gun carriages meant she couldn’t really fire a broadside; instead gunners must have fired whenever they could see something more or less in line with their gun. More than half of the guns were quasi-breechloaders; an iron chamber was charged with powder and shot, then wedged into place. These things were on immense non-recoiling carriages; it must have put interesting stress on the ship’s timbers when they fired. The brass guns on the Mary Rose did have recoiling carriages, but there were not very many of them (15 compared to 76 wrought iron guns); the English hadn’t really developed the technology of casting brass yet and most were imported.

The French made extensive use of galleys in these wars. I’d always thought galleys were only useful in Mediterranean waters, and even then only under dead calm, but apparently the English were quite afraid of them. The Mary Rose and her contemporaries had their cannon mounted relatively high up (their intended use was clearing the enemy’s deck rather than smashing his hull); thus they couldn’t depress far enough to engage a galley once it got close. The galleys, in turn, no longer used a ram; instead they had one very heavy cannon mounted on the centerline, with smaller guns alongside. The cannon were used as sort of a long-range ram. In the Mary Rose’s last battle, the French used an interesting tactic; they moved within range of the English fleet, then positioned themselves stern-to-stern like spokes of a wheel. A galley fired, then all backed oars on one side and pulled on the other, causing the entire circle to rotate. When the next galley was in position, it fired, then reloaded while circling. This allowed the galleys to keep up a fairly rapid fire – the arrangement was rather like an incipient gun turret.

The Mary Rose was maneuvering to engage the galleys when she capsized. She had always been a fast ship – once winning a race against the rest of the fleet even though starting four miles behind the leader – and her nominal tonnage had increase to 700, as opposed to 500 at her launch. Almost all the weight appears to have been added above the waterline. Finally, and paradoxically, she was handicapped by having a picked crew. Her captain complained that every one of her mariners thought they knew best, and it was difficult to get them to work together. A top-heavy ship maneuvering rapidly with a disorganized crew – the Mary Rose heeled over far enough to put her lowermost gun ports under water, and that’s all she wrote. Because she had her boarding netting rigged, only a few of her crew escaped.

Well written and very well illustrated, with both period and modern pictures. Except for some confusion about whether naval cannon were made of bronze or brass there were no problems with the text. The obligatory nod to political correctness notes that a species of “shipworm” (actually clams) that began colonizing the Mary Rose timbers after she was rediscovered and exposed but before she was raised was thought to be native to warmer waters, and global warming is implicated. However, there’s also a comment that Henry VIII’s requirement for all his subjects to practice with the handgun and harquebus anticipated the American Second Amendment – and there’s no snarkiness about it.… (plus d'informations)