You Think You Know Who Discovered the North Pole?

  

                                        James Clark Ross as a Royal Navy Captain with Arctic furs and an instrument, bottom right, to measure the magnetic field. 

You were probably taught that the first persons to reach the North Pole were American explorer Robert Perry, a Navy engineer, and his trusty servant/aide Mathew Henson.  There were also four Inuits who are hardly ever mentioned, Ootah, Seeglo, Egingwah, and Ooqueah.  Perry claimed to have finally reached the illusive prize of decades of Polar exploration on April 9, 1909.  But you may have been misinformed on two counts.

First, there is now significant doubt that the Perry party ever actually achieved the Pole.  After an arduous 36 day “dash” across the rugged sea ice, an exhausted Perry may simply have thrown up his hands and declared he was there.  Later analysis of his raw navigational readings showed sloppiness, inconsistency, and perhaps out-right fraud.  Also, his and Henson’s account of the journey were at odds—Perry claiming a relative bee-line crossing from his base camp to explain how he achieved the distance in the time reported, and Henson’s story of painstaking zig-zagging to avoid ice ridges and fissures. 

 

Members of Robert Perry's sledge team including Mathew Henson and four Inuit posed with flags at the alleged North Geographic Pole on April 9, 1909.

When he got home, Perry had to dispute claims that a rival expedition led by Frederick Cook had reached the goal on April 21, 1908, almost a year earlier.  Cooks data and claims were even more iffy Perry got prestigious support from the Navy, which honored him with a promotion to Captain on his return, the National Geographic Society, and the Explorers’ Club.  For years Perry’s claims were honored until recent investigators began picking apart his story.

Still, if you grant that Perry made it to the Pole, or at least close enough, as some Arctic scholars continue to maintain, the achievement is for the geographic pole—the point on the globe furthest north at the opposite end from a point in Antarctica marking the axis on which the Earth turns at a slight angle to the plane of the planet’s orbit around the Sun.  But there are other poles, representing the ends of the magnetic field that surround the globe.  The Magnetic North Pole is currently about 500 kilometers south of the Geographic Pole in northern Canada, but it can wander several kilometers a year.  It has been as far south as 1500 KM and as close as 200 KM over the millenniums. 

The first person to reach the Magnetic North, or at least where it was on June 1, 1831 was Royal Navy officer James Clark Ross.  Ross became the most celebrated British polar explorer of the Victorian Age.

                                         John Ross sponsored his nephew in the Royal Navy and included him on his first Arctic expedition.

Ross was born in London into a comfortable middle class family with connections to the Royal Navy on April 15, 1800.  Under the sponsorship of his uncle, Scottish born Commander John Ross, a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, the boy entered the Navy as a midshipman at age 15.

Three years later in 1818 he accompanied his uncle who was in command of an Arctic expedition organized by the Admiralty to find the supposed Northwest Passage from the Atlantic across the northern coast of North America to the Bering Sea.   This was an international obsession.  The discovery of such a route, even if only available for a few months each year, could cut as much as a year from the long voyages to Asia around either the Cape of Good Hope in Africa or around the Horn of South America, a key to untold riches in trade.  It would also secure claims on North America against Arctic rivals including Norway, Russia, and the United States.

The senior Ross commanding HMS Isabella and accompanied by HMS Alexander under Lieutenant William Edward Parry. They sailed counter-clockwise around Baffin Bay repeating the observations made by William Baffin two hundred years before. In August they entered Lancaster Sound at the north end of Baffin Island which later proved to be the eastern gate of the Northwest Passage. Sailing several miles west Ross turned back after seeing what turned out to be a mirage—a mountain range blocking the end of the straight. 

William Edward Parry was John Ross's second in Command in 1819 and then commanded four more expeditions which included the younger James Clark Ross.    

Arriving back home in England, Commander Ross was hailed as a hero and promoted to Captain.  But Parry publicly disputed Ross’s decision to turn back and cast doubt on the existence of the mysterious mountain range.  Ross’s reputation was injured and Parry was given command of the next British expedition in 1819.

Parry thought well enough, however, of young John Ross to include him in the crew. Parry’s voyage, undertaken in an unusually ice-free year, went through what the Parry Channel and three quarters of the way across the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, making was named it the most productive voyage in the quest for the Northwest Passage for decades. Parry was rewarded with a promotion to Commander and election as a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Sea Ice by German artist Caspar David Frierich based on Parry's accounts of the 1824-25 expedition  showed the power of the ice to trap and smash the HMS Fury.

John Ross would make four Arctic voyages with Parry from 1819 to 1827.  On the third voyage, 1824-1825 one of the two expedition ships, HMS Fury was trapped in the ice trying to enter Hudson’s Bay from the North.  Parry’s last arctic voyage would have a different mission—trying to reach the Geographic North Pole by sailing north from Norwegian arctic island of Spitzbergen in 1847.  That voyage achieved the furthest point north ever recorded by Europeans, 82°45’N, a record that would stand for 49 years.

Parry’s Navy career then took him to other duties and the Admiralty once turned to Captain John Ross to resume the search for the Northwest Passage.  James Clark Ross, now a Lieutenant and the most experienced Arctic junior officer in the Royal Navy, was his uncles right hand man on the Second Ross Expedition, 1829-34.  The expedition was blocked from advancing for four years at the north end of the Boothia Peninsula.  Having been criticized for turning back too early on his first voyage and well provisioned Captain Ross waited years for an ice melt that would allow him to go further but in 1831 his ship HMS Victory became totally trapped by the ice.

In 1831 the Captain dispatched his nephew to lead a small party overland to try and find open water.  It was on that trek that James Clark Ross identified what was then the location of the North Magnetic Pole on the western side of the peninsula.  It was on this trip that the younger Ross charted the Beaufort Islands, later renamed Clarence Islands by his uncle.

When the Captain determined the Victory would have to be abandoned, James Clark Ross trekked to the site of the wreckage of Parry’s HMS Fury.  He found that ship gone, presumably crushed and sunk in the ice, but discovered her boats reparable on the beach.  On July 1, 1832, the crew sailed in three of the boats and reached Barrow Strait at the end of August. Finding an unbroken field of ice, they waited four weeks for the ice to melt, gave up, returned south, left their boats at Batty Bay and walked back to Fury Beach. On July 8, 1833 they left for Batty Bay and on August 14 saw open water for the first time. They reached the head of Prince Regent Inlet and on August 26 they were seen by the Isabella which Parry had commanded in 1819.  By October 1833 they were back in England.

The achievement of the Magnetic Pole was widely celebrated when the expedition finally returned, and the saga of the expedition’s ordeal was widely recounted.  James Clark Ross was promoted to Captain and due to his expertise with instruments that measure the earth’s magnetic fields, was given a special assignment to conduct a magnetic survey of Great Britain with Edward Sabin from 1834-39. 

He interrupted that service in 1836 to lead a relief expedition to find and resupply the crews of 11 British whaling ships trapped in the ice around Baffin Island.  He set sail in HMS Cove in January. The crossing was difficult, and by the time he had reached the last known position of the whalers in June, all but one had managed to return home. Ross found no trace of this last vessel, William Torr, which was probably crushed in the ice in 1835.

Despite his fame for these exploits, James Ross’s most celebrated expedition was yet to come and at the other end of the world.

 Sea Ice by German artist Caspar David Frierich based on Parry's accounts of the 1824-25 expedition  showed the power of the ice to trap and smash the HMS Fury.

Between 1839 and 1843, Ross commanded an Antarctic expedition comprising the ships HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, bomb vessels which were unusual warships named after the mortar bombs they were designed to fire and constructed with extremely strong hulls to withstand the recoil of the mortars which was of great value in thick ice.  Ross charted much of the coastline of the continent.

In 1841 he discovered the Ross Sea, Victoria Land, and the volcanoes Mount Erebus and Mount Terror. He sailed for 250 nautical miles along the edge of the low, flat-topped ice shelf they called the Great Ice Barrier, later named the Ross Ice Shelf. In the following year, he attempted to penetrate south at about 55°W and explored the eastern side of what is now known as James Ross Island, discovering and naming Snow Hill Island and Seymour Island. Ross reported that Admiralty Sound appeared to him to have been blocked by glaciers at its southern end.

                             Antarctica features discovered and charted by James Clark Ross.

For his monumental discoveries Ross was awarded the Gold Medal of the Société de Géographie in 1843, knighted in 1844, and elected to the Royal Society in 1848.

In 1848 Ross had one last adventure.  He commanded one of three expeditions to find Sir John Franklin, an experienced Arctic hand and recently the Governor of Tasmania.  After Ross himself had declined the assignment, Franklin was put in charge of the latest Northwest Passage expedition in 1845 and given Ross’s trusty ships Erebus and Terror to complete the estimated 500 final miles of the Passage.  The expedition was last seen by Europeans on July 26, 1845, when Captain Dannett of the whaler Prince of Wales encountered Terror and Erebus moored to an iceberg in Lancaster Sound.  It is now believed that the expedition wintered in 1845–46 on Beechey Island. The ships became trapped in ice off King William Island in September 1846 and never sailed again. According to a note later found on that island, Franklin died there on June 11, 1847. But no one then knew that.

Ross was given command of HMS Enterprise, accompanied by HMS Investigator, Because of heavy ice in Baffin Bay he only reached the northeast tip of Somerset Island where he was frozen in at Port Leopold. In the spring he and Francis McClintock explored the west coast of the island by sledge. He recognized Peel Sound but thought it too ice-choked for Franklin to have used.  In fact, Franklin used it in 1846 the sea ice was atypically low. The next summer he tried to reach Wellington Channel but was blocked by ice and returned to England frustrated.

 The fate of Sir John Franklin and his crew as imagined by artist W. Turner Smith in The End in Sight,  1848.

He was not alone.  None of the first three expeditions had any better luck.  In 1854, the Scottish explorer Dr. John Rae, surveying the Boothia Peninsula for the Hudson’s Bay Company, learned from Inuit hunters that both ships had become icebound, and the men had tried to reach safety on foot but had succumbed to cold, and some had resorted to cannibalism.  The report horrified Victorian society which refused to believe it.  Public pressure to find Franklin or a more heroic ending resulted in 25 more expeditions being sent over the next four decades, including one commanded by 70-year-old Sir John Ross in 1870.  Eventually, more ships and men were lost looking for Franklin than in the expedition itself.

As for Sir James Clark Ross, he settled into an honored and comfortable retirement with his wife, Lady Ann Ross.  They split their time between a London townhouse and in the ancient House of the Abbots of St. Albans in Buckinghamshire.  He died at Aylesbury in 1862, five years after his wife.  They were buried next to each other in churchyard of St. James the Great, Aston Abbotts. In the gardens of the Abbey there is a lake with two islands, named after the ships Terror and Erebus.

 

HMS Dreadnaught Led the Race for Naval Dominance and to a World War

HMS Dreadnaught and the Home Fleet under steam.

On February 10, 1906 the Royal Navy launched the Battleship HMS Dreadnaught.  She was the sixth ship of the line to carry that name but she represented a revolution in naval armament.

When John “Jacky” Fisher became First Lord of the Sea of the Board of the Admiralty in 1904 he set out to toughly reform and rebuild a hidebound institution.  He was heavily influenced, as were top naval officers in Germany, Italy, and Japan by the theories of the American officer Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan whose 1890 book The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783 and subsequent studies of more modern conflicts set forth a new doctrine of achieving world dominance by the extension of naval power.  Mahan’s book, now known only to military and naval historians, has been called one of the five most influential books of the 19th Century because it helped to set off a worldwide naval arms race.

First Sea Lord Jackie Fisher was inspired by the work of American Navy Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan whose 1890 book The Influence of Sea Power Upon History was called one of the five most influential books  of the 19th Century alongside such tomes as Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species, Carl Marx's Das Kapital, Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, and  Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.
 

Fisher was also impressed by the technological advances of the U.S. Navy and it Maine class battleships that had made mincemeat of the old fashion Spanish Navy in 1898.  The Japanese, adopting the same model, had crushed the Russians in 1905.  All the major sea powers now had battleships of roughly equal capacity, armament, and speed.

Fisher sent 150 obsolete ships to scrap and began an ambitious modernization and construction program that included the creation of a new class of vessel, the destroyer, fast light cruisers, and experiments with submarines.  But at the heart of his reforms were a whole new class of battleships, of which the Dreadnaught was the first.

The main innovation was the switch from mixed batteries of light and heavy guns to batteries of exclusively heavy guns capable of lethal fire at 5,000 or more yards.  This long range capacity was important as rapid advances in torpedo technology had put battleships at risk of that kind of attack at the 2000 yard ranges and under at which the Japanese engaged at the Battle of the Yalu River against the Chinese in 1894 and the U.S. Navy defeated the Spanish at Manila Bay in 1898.

 

American Maine class battleships had destroyed the antiquated Spanish fleet at firing at 2000 yards the Battle of Manila Bay during the Spanish American War, but the development of effective long-range torpedoes meant that the Royal Navy's Dreadnaught class had to carry guns effective at twice that range.

 
The Dreadnaught featured a main battery of ten 12-inch guns, along with twenty-two 12 pounders as her secondary armament.  The revolutionary ship was also the first be powered by steam turbine instead of reciprocal engines greatly increasing her speed.  The ship was also more heavily armored than previous battleships, and armor extended further under the water line in defense of torpedoes.

Fisher knew that his efforts were not alone.  Both the Americans and Japanese laid keels for similar ships about the same time.  Using techniques he had mastered earlier as Second Sea Lord, Fisher put pressure on the ship yard at Portsmouth to speed production.  He wanted to prove to the world, but particularly to the ambitious Germans, that the Royal Navy would be capable of quickly converting virtually its whole main battle line to the new class, thus discouraging, he hoped, attempts to catch up.  The keel was laid in October 1905 and she was launched the following February, an astonishingly short time. 

She was soon fitted, armed, and completed sea trials and was commissioned in December of 1906.  She was made flagship of the Home Fleet.

 

First Lord of the Sea, John "Jackie" Fisher (left) reviewing the modern Home Fleet that he had built on the eve of the Great War.

Far from discouraging a naval arms race, the Dreadnaught set off a frenzied new round of construction.  In Germany Kaiser Wilhelm II ordered the Kaiserliche Marine (Imperial Navy) to step up its own building program.  Most historians agree that tensions between the two empires caused by this naval arms race were a significant contributing cause of the First World War.

The Dreadnaught’s actual service life was brief.  She was quickly rendered obsolete by second generation ships.  She missed the only battle between the main German and British fleets in the war, the Battle of Jutland on May 13, 1916 because she was laid up at base in Scapa Flow for refitting. 

 

HMS Dreadnaught was laid up at Scapa Flow for re-fitting and missed the Battle of Jutland, the only confrontation by the main British and German fleets in World War I.  Although the Kaiselich Marine inflicted more damage, it was unable to destroy the Home Fleet and was compelled to return to base--an essential tie that had no effect whatsoever on the outcome of the war.

Her only combat action of the war was the sinking of the submarine U-29 by ramming her in March of 1915.  In the summer of 1916 she was posted to the Thames in protection of London and fired her anti-aircraft guns at German bombers.  It was the only time she ever fired any of her guns in anger.

Shortly after the war she was placed in reserve and then sold for scrap in 1921 and broken up in Scotland in January, 1923.  

The age of the great battleships, often called Dreadnaughts in her honor, was itself short lived.  Their effectiveness for fleet to fleet combat was effectively ended in the age of the aircraft carrier.  The last such combat was the Battle of Surigao Strait, part of the larger Battle of Leyte Gulf in October, 1944 when an American task force destroyed a Japanese force.

The U.S. Navy took its World War II era battle wagons like the USS Wisconsin out of mothballs to once again serve as floating artillery platforms against land targets in Operation Desert Storm.  They also fired Tomahawk cruise missiles.  It was the last hurrah of the battleship.  They were official decommissioned after the Gulf War

The Royal Navy decommissioned its last battle ship, HMS Vanguard in 1960.  The U. S. Navy used the big ships essentially as floating artillery batteries against land targets in the Korean and Vietnam Wars.  Some were brought out of moth balls to be used again in the same capacity in Lebanon in 1984 and with the addition of Tomahawk missiles in the Gulf War.  The final four Iowa Class battleships, the last active dreadnaughts in the world, were decommissioned for the last time between 1989 and 1991.



 

 

The Mary Rose From a Watery Grave to a Resurrection

The Mary Rose as depicted in the Anthony Roll, a survey of all of King Henry VII's ships, after her 1636 reconstruction with he distinct carrack profile of high castles fore and aft. Although the number of guns and gun ports is not entirely accurate, the picture is overall an good illustration of the ship.

On July 18, 1536 the Mary Rose already had 26 years of service which made her old for a heavy warship in an era when worms, barnacles, and dry rot took a toll on hulls, keels, and decking in addition to the great hazards of foundering in heavy weather, running aground, or being sunk or captured in combat.  But she was the core of English King Henry VIII’s small personal navy and for many of her years his heaviest ship laden with a huge complement of cannon.  She had survived combat, mostly against the French in the naval adventures that the Tudor monarch had been able to undertake against his much more formidable Continental enemies.

But she had been in idle reserve for years when she was hauled to dry dock almost completely rebuilt that year with a treasury newly swollen by the King’s seizure and closure of the monasteries. Records of her original conformation and of the reconstruction are sketchy but naval historians and archeologists believe she was probably re-planked with fresh heavy oak from the hull to the decks.  In the process at least one additional deck was added giving her a total of four, the distinctive high fore and aft castles of a carrack raised even more.  She was one of the first war ships outfitted with a new innovation—gun ports—that added two more levels of artillery platforms to the open deck.  In the new form she carried between 78 and 91 guns, although some were light deck swivel guns meant for anti-personnel use.  That was an enormous wallop, although the in-line battle formations that made the use of broadsides so deadly had not yet been developed.  She would have to try to deploy those guns in virtual free-for-all close quarter melees.  In the process of this her tonnage increased about 500 to between 700 and 900 and her complement of crew, soldiers, and gunners swollen considerably.

Henry must have been pleased.  He made Mary Rose the flagship of his navy and set her off in service of his dream of restoring England to major power status.

At the turn of the 16th Century, England, having lost all but a toehold of its French holdings and having been embroiled for years in the dynastic War of the Roses had been reduced to being a peripheral European power.  Mighty France was in the ascendency, Spain was newly unified and had begun to fatten from the plunder of gold and silver from the New World, and its Hapsburg dynasty also had control of the seafaring Low Countries. 

The English were far from the world dominant sea power they would become.  Henry VII, founder of the Tudor dynasty at the end of the War of the Roses was able to maintain only a small personal navy—five or six reasonably heavy ships.  In time of war merchant vessels were hastily and sometimes unsuitably adapted as war ships and small fleets light galleys—the staple of naval warfare since Roman times were slapped together.  Most fighting would be done within sight of shore—often in support of raids, invasions, and land campaigns. 

Open water fleet confrontations were rare, but with the rapid development of global empires would become more important.  Most open ocean combat was commerce raiding and conducted by privateers.

At the end of his reign Henry VII had a very small personal navy and only two sizable warships.  Circumstantial evidence indicates that he ordered the construction of the Mary Rose and a slightly smaller companion Peter Pomegranate to join his carracks Regent and Sovereign. Because the old growth giant oaks necessary for the two new ships had to be gathered from forest remnants across England, construction was not begun until just after young Henry VIII, then just 20 years old, assumed the throne.

Henry VIII as we are not used to seeing him--a just crowned 20 year old King who took special interest in the construction of new warships.

The ambitious young monarch with big plans evidently took a personal interest in the construction.  He also probably selected her name, either for his favorite sister Mary and the Tudor Rose or for the Virgin Mary as symbolized by a rose.  Perhaps the name even had a double meaning.

Her keel was laid in Portsmouth in 1510 and she was launched in July 1511 and then towed to London and fitted with rigging and decking and supplied with armaments.  No known plans or pictures from life are known from this period and there is some controversy as to her exact conformation, but she drew about 500 tons.  The shape of the hull was a tumblehome form and reflected the use of the ship as a platform for heavy guns. Above the waterline, the hull gradually narrowed to compensate for the weight of the guns and to make boarding more difficult. 

The open deck between the fore and aft castles was meant to accommodate not only artillery, but scores of yeomen longbowmen who could rain death into the rigging and onto the decks of opposing warships.  There would also need to be room for compliments of heavy bruisers capable of wielding cutlasses in boarding parties.   These troops—and additional soldiers if she was on an invasion or raiding mission usually outnumbered the sailing crew and gunners. 

When Mary Rose set sail on her first combat cruise in 1512 she carried 206 sailors; 120 gunners; 22 sailing officers, surgeons, pursers, quartermasters, and the like; and 411 soldiers of all types.  That was a mighty crowded ship.

That year Henry VIII had made an alliance with the Spanish against the French after his marriage to Catherine of Aragon for the War of the League of Cambrai.  Her first action was as Admiral Sir Edward Howard’s flagship in action against a combined French and Breton fleet in the English Channel.  In action in support of a landing of Spanish troops further south, Howard’s fleet captured 12 Breton ships and conducted landings and raids along the Breton coast.  Her first action was a victory.

The Cordelière and Regent locked in a mutual death grip after a powder magazine explosion on the French ship set both a blaze from a contemporary illustration to a French poem about the battle.

Later that year she got to use her heavy guns against a superior fleet for the first time at the Battle of Saint-Mathieu off the coast of Brest.  Mary Rose reportedly led the charge into a large French/Breton fleet which was disorganized.  In a confused melee fight the English got the upper hand.  The battle is best remembered because the Breton flagship Cordelière and was boarded by the Regent, a newer English ship drawing 1,000 tons.  In the confusing fight the powder magazine of the Cordelière blew up setting fire to the Regent and sinking her.  Only about 180 and of the English ship’s crew and a handful of Bretons survived.  The High Admiral of France and the Steward of the town of Morlaix were among the hundreds killed.  Admiral Howard burned 27 French ships, captured another five and landed forces near Brest to raid and take prisoners.   More damage might have been done but Channel storms caused the English fleet to return to England for repairs.

The war dragged on for another two years.  In 1512 Admiral Howard was killed after leading a boarding party against a pesky galley and the fleet returned to England in disarray.  By 1514 the war ended with a new peace between the old rivals and the marriage of Henry’s sister Mary to French King Louis XII.

Mary Rose other English carracks were taken out of ordinary and spruced to escort Henry VIII to his rendezvous with the French King Francis I at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in June 1520.  From the 1540 painting  The Embarkation of Henry VIII at Dover.

With the outbreak of peace Mary Rose and most other English war ships were laid up in ordinary—docked with a skeleton crew of a dozen or so and minimally maintained until 1522 with one short exception—she and other reserve ships were called into service and decorated lavishly to escort Henry to France for his meeting with new French King Francis I at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in June 1520. Their menacing magnificence was meant as a warning to the French king.

Peace could never last too long between the old rivals.  In 1522 Henry allied himself with Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and the Papal States for a war on the Mediterranean power Venice and France.  England planned an invasion of France while French armies, the Austrians and Papal states slugged it out in Italy.  Mary Rose escorted an invasion fleet which captured the Breton port of Morlaix.  She returned to England without serious naval combat.  Most of the rest of the war was conducted on land in France, with the English managing to briefly threaten Paris.  The Scots joined the war on the French side and Mary Rose spent most of the rest of the war patrolling the Channel to deter French counter-raids and harass the Scots.

Meanwhile the French were defeated in Italy at the Battle of Pavia where Francis was captured by armies personally led by Charles V.  in 1525.  That ended Charles’s interest in the war and Henry was forced to withdraw empty handed from France.

Mary Rose returned to ordinary and kept in reserve until 1545.  It was during this period that she was “made new” along with most of the other capital ships of the small Navy under the stewardship of the King’s favorite at the time, Thomas Cromwell.  Despite the enlargement and reconstruction, she returned to ordinary for another nine years after work was completed.

Henry VIII complex marriage arrangements had made the former pious Defender of the Faith abandon Catholicism and awkwardly back into Protestantism.  His divorce from Catherine of Aragon who could not produce a male heir precipitated the change.  It also cut him off from his former alliance with Spain.  His very profitable—for him—seizure of the monasteries earned the further wrath of another former ally, the Pope.  Henry and England were diplomatically marginalized and the likely target for a Catholic crusade led by mighty France.

Once again Henry accepted an alliance with Charles V and agreed to cooperate on invasions of France from opposite directions.  Mary Rose was called to escort the invasion force that managed to capture Boulogne at great cost in September 1544.  But Charles made a separate peace with France and left his ally high, dry, and dangerously exposed.  The French were now able to concentrate their power against the English.

Galleys swarm carracks which can't bring their broadsides to bear against the fast, maneuverable gunboats. 

In July a huge force under the command of Admiral Claude d’Annebault set sail for England from Havre de Grâce with 128 ships including a large number of nimble Mediterranean galleys and an army of 30,000 or so.  The English could muster only 80 ships, most of them hastily converted merchantmen and about 18,000 troops.  After a brief attempt at a counter raid the English retreated to Portsmouth.  The French advanced into the Solent, the strait that separates the Isle of Wight from the mainland. They landed troops on the Isle and advanced on Portsmouth where the English capital ships were becalmed and unable to maneuver.

Henry VIII dined on board Great Harry, the flagship of Admiral John Dudley on the evening of July 18 and then retired to land to watch the battle unfold.  The French attacked with their galleys aiming to swarm and destroy the helpless warships.  The English had only a dozen galleys of their own, which they sent out on a virtual suicide mission to stop the attack.  Then, almost miraculously, the wind suddenly rose.  Led by the venerable Mary Rose, flagship of Vice Admiral George Carew, the English charged the attacking galleys scattering them.  They were driving on the French capital ships in the Solent when Mary Rose in the van suddenly foundered and sank taking over 400 of her crew and soldiers to their deaths.

Mary Rose heels over and founders in this 19th Century painting of the disaster.

The French thought that their galleys had managed to get close enough to sink her, but there is no evidence of that.  No one knows exactly how she came to suddenly disastrously take water.  The leading theory is that the inexperienced gun crews—there were hardly any other kind after all of the years of peace— left the lowest tier of gun ports open after a salvo allowing them to be swamped with water as she heeled over in a mild wind to make a turn. Henry watched unbelieving from shore.

Despite the loss, the English charge disrupted and scattered the French fleet.  Meanwhile multiple landings on the Isle of Wight were repulsed in bitter fighting.  They took especially heavy casualties in an assault on the newly built fortress at Bonchurch which was defended by local militia.

His invasion in disarray and his own flagship leaking heavily and in danger of sinking out from under him, Admiral d’Annebault abandoned his attack and sailed back to France.  England had almost miraculously been saved.

The mysterious fate of the gallant Mary Rose quickly became the stuff of legend and of ballads. 

Her loss and the close call encouraged Henry VIII to modernize his navy.  The King’s personal service the fleet was reorganized into the Navy Royal and expanded to 58 vessels by the time of Henry’s death in 1547.  His immediate successors, the boy king Edward VI and Queen Mary let the fleet deteriorate again to a mere coastal defense force.  Elizabeth I is usually credited with the determination to make England a world dominate naval power, but she had to rely on privateers and pirates like John Hawkins and Francis Drake to beat back the next great invasion threat—the Spanish Armada.  It was not until Restoration of Charles II in 1660 that the modern Royal Navy was officially created.

The dive team that discovered Mary Rose--Lt. Commander Alan Bax at center.

As for Mary Rose, she lay unmolested below the Solent for centuries until her wreckage was discovered in 1971 after years of searching by teams led by historian, journalist, and amateur diver Alexander McKee and a group led by Lieutenant-Commander Alan Bax of the Royal Navy, sponsored by the Committee for Nautical Archaeology in London.  The two teams had originally been fierce rivals with different theories of how she was lost and where exactly she might lay, but eventually combined efforts. She was found buried in silt 1.9 miles south of the entrance to Portsmouth harbor at a depth of just 36 feet at low tide.

The location had to be kept a secret because under British law at the time she could be freely plundered by looters and treasure hunters.  As a thin legal fiction, the discovery teams leased the seabed from Portsmouth harbor to afford questionable protection.  In 1973 Parliament finally passed the Protection of Wrecks Act that the Mary Rose was declared to be of national historic interest and enjoyed full legal protection from any disturbance by commercial salvage teams.  Even then there were years of lingering litigation and “personal items” retrieved from the wreck like chests, clothing remnants, cooking utensils, and some tools were claimed as fair game by salvagers and were in danger of being seized and auctioned off if raised from the wreck. 

It took years for a Mary Rose Committee with representatives from the National Maritime Museum, the Royal Navy, the BBC, and local Portsmouth organizations to raise money, mostly from private donors, to begin serious attempts to save and raise the ship.  The Committee became a registered charity in 1974, the same year it got official Royal patronage from Prince Charles, who made dives to the site. 

By 1978 initial excavation was complete revealing a remarkably intact hull.  Now that the hull was exposed, preservationists had to act quickly before biological decay and the scouring of the currents destroyed the wreckage. 

The cost of raising her would be enormous so a new organization, The Mary Rose Trust was created to raise funds and oversee the operations.  In 1979 the salvage vessel Sleipner was purchased for the operation and diving grew to 50 man teams working nine months a year with scores of additional volunteer divers.  From 1979 to 1982 over 22,000 diving hours were spent on the site, amounting to 11.8 man-years.

Raising Mary Rose.

On the morning of October 11, 1982 just before foul weather would delay the project another year and after years of technological challenges, fits and starts, and sometimes dissention on the team, the operation to raise the wreck finally began.  A special frame that had been built to encase and stabilize the wreck was slowly jacked up on four legs straddling the wreck site to pull her off the seabed. The massive crane of the barge Tog Mor  lifted the frame and hull on to the specially designed cradle which was padded with water-filled bags.  Then with Prince Charles, BBC crew, and scores of excited witnesses the final lift began with the wreck breaking water at 9:02.  Despite one leg of the frame buckling and a corner of the frame slipping nearly 3 feet, the hull was lifted successfully out with minimal damage. 

The hull was brought to the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard by where Admiral Horatio Nelson’s flagship Victory was preserved.  Decades of meticulous preservation work was completed in carefully climate controlled environments, much of the time with the wreck and work observable to the public behind glass.  Special care also had to be taken with hundreds of artifacts from the wreck which went on display in the nearby Mary Rose Museum.  

Viewing Mary Rose behind glass at the new Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth.

The new Mary Rose Museum was designed by architects Wilkinson Eyre, Perkins+Wil and carefully built over and around not only the wreck but the historic dry dock at a cost of £35 million.  It opened to the public on May 31, 2013.  More than 70 million visitors have already toured the facility and in 2017 it was voted the most popular tourist attraction in Europe.

Preservation of the hull is finally nearly complete.  It is slowly being dried under careful conditions.  But right now visitors can see the resurrected Mary Rose.