Hello Gents!
Hope you're doing well.
Concurrent with my galley builds, I wanted to share another project I'm hard at work on. This is the Mary Rose, one of the best known and most famous of all Renaissance warships.
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Fate is a capricious mistress. We would like, ideally for the most significant ships of any particular era to be duly sunk in such a way that preserves them perfectly for posterity. Instead, the ships we discover as wrecks are a random assortment of every conceivable type, most often in a terrible state of preservation. When someone says 'we have discovered a Spanish galleon,' what they mean is they have discovered a pile of bottles, cannons, bullion and a few worm-eaten planks mostly buried on the sea floor, that they have determined is all that remains of a particular Spanish galleon. Archaeologists rarely get the most desirable sort of ships in the most desirable state of preservation.
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But the Mary Rose is, in every respect, an exception, one of those ships that Marine Archaeologists would vote to have if they had their choice. She was a front-line ship, an innovative design, one of the best handling vessels of her type, and, in all respects, a powerful and significant warship of her era. And what era was that? The Tudor Era of Henry VIII, the decades that saw the establishment of the Navy Royale, the direct predecessor of the Royal Navy. The battles fought by the Navy Royale were mostly inconclusive, but in terms of ship design, England was leading the world. The men who built the Mary Rose were among the very best naval architects in the world at that time, and upon completion this ship was a state-of-the-art representation of marine military technology.
And this was no accident. From the moment he ascended to the throne of England, Henry Tudor was intent on foreign wars that would bring him wealth and glory. He also understood clearly that the defense of England depended, above all, on her navy. Henry VIII didn't just order ships to be built. He invested heavily in infrastructure, logistics, and dockside support. Prior to Henry VIII England did not have a significant gun-foundry industry. Carracks like the Regent of Henry VII were armed with foreign made cannons purchased for England. Henry VIII changed all of that, bringing expert weapon makers from the continent to England, forming the basis of a native English heavy cannon industry that would remain vital to English and British interests right through the Dreadnought Era.
The Mary Rose belonged to the last generation of Carracks, the Medieval warship type par-excellence. She also belonged to the first generation of vessels that fired cannons through specially designed gun-ports in her side. As such she stands as a transitional type, a missing link between Medieval Sea Warfare and the Age of the Renaissance Galleon, the type that would be perfected by the sons of the men who designed and built the Mary Rose.
