Ghosts Of The Mary Rose (British History Documentary) | Timeline

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the sinking of Henry the eighth's mighty water the mary-rose remains one of our greatest maritime mysteries what's happened on that ill-fated day in 1545 has puzzled historians and archeologists for centuries now scientists investigating the skeletons have uncovered new evidence about crew the most startling fire offers a completely original explanation of why the Mary Rose tank [Music] it's a time capsule these people are lying they're often clothed in what they were wearing carrying the equipment they would have carried with their personal possessions with them you can't help but look at these people firstly sent to the tragedy and then secondly wonder who they were how do they come to be there what were they doing on board when they met their deaths there in the early 1980s I volunteered as a diver on the Mary Rose today I'm an intensive care doctor and carrying out research at University College London my later research is focused on how bones change with exercise and with injury patterns you can actually learn a lot about a person from where the skeleton is so that's my passion is to take that knowledge back 20 odd years to see if we can't work out who these people were I was one of 500 divers working on the Mary Rose it was one of the largest underwater excavations ever undertaken [Music] we found amazing objects longbows bronze cannon and alongside these weapons of war more personal possessions [Music] the excavation caused the sensation the Mary Rose was Britain's Pompeii a moment of life frozen in time up to now attention has focused on these objects but what both fascinated and appalled the divers were the human remains there was a number of ribs and a leather jerkin and that really brought it home to me you know this is part of the person's clothing you know this is you know it was it really came alive to me one of the guns was lifted that's right there was an body try absolute hand underneath it and you think you realize how that person died he was caught with his arms beneath wasn't healed and you imagine this poor fellow clamped onto this probably a ton of bronze in his last movements trying to shift it of course they can't have thought when they set out that that was what they held for them the dilemmas recovered nearly 10,000 human bones from the Mary Rose but we had little idea who these people were since diving on the wreck I've been haunted by the fate of these men I've always wanted to know what happened the historical records are very limited we know the Mary Rose was 34 years old and one of Henry the eighth's most heavily armed warships she carried a crew of over 400 men but we don't know who most of them were or where they came from we only know for sure the identity of one person onboard that day the Admiral George Carew in the summer of 1545 Carew sailed the Mary Rose out of Portsmouth Harbor to engage an invading French fleet he fired a broadside at the enemy then a few minutes later had to make a quick maneuver to avoid running aground during this move in calm seas the ship took on water keeled over and sank the reason for this disaster has always puzzled me [Music] I've come back to Portsmouth to investigate further the horrors of that summer's day it said that Henriette could hear the screams and absolutely across across the water that sound travels over there it is literally just a mile over to Southie Colonel thought when she thanked the last time as the main last in the foremast were up above the surface of the water at this point she thank this is the boy Monty was flying working said Henry Yates Anning they're watching the pride of his fleet sink to the bottom yep the death toll on the Marie Rose was horrendous auntie boarding netting covered the upper deck it was coated in tar and sand to make it difficult for enemy boarders to cut through but when the vessel sank it trapped nearly everyone inside almost the entire crew of around 400 men died so what was happening on the Mary Rose in the moments before she sank you've got a very concentrated time period with an awful lot of action going on a lot of noise the guns going off the French attacking everything in chaos she may have been making that turn too tightly possibly was too much sales there so some disorganization on board so George Carew was shouting across to one of the other English ships that he has the sort of waves that he could not rule knaves whom he could not rule the last reported words from the Admiral onboard the Mary Rose appear to blame the crew so were the men responsible for their own fate the mary-rose trust has allowed us to carry out an exhaustive scientific investigation but the crew found in the wreck we've examined some of the skeletons in detail including one who may have played a critical role in the sinking when we set out I had no idea that this forensic detective work would lead to a startling conclusion about why the Mary Rose sank in 1982 after removing the contents of the ship the Mary Rose trust raised her to the surface there is the first sight of this black ship of Henry the eighth it's the first time we have seen this in 437 years what an amazing sight this oak hold had been a giant coffin for most of the men of the Mary Rose I'd always been intrigued by the Admirals harsh description of the crew as nades who he could not control have they somehow contributed to the sinking of the ship to help lay their ghosts to rest I'm determined to find out more about the crew I've returned to the ship shrouded in its preservative mist to find out who would have been where and doing what at the time of the sinking amazing last time I got this close I was probably back in there so yeah if you remember I mean this is diving on the hole here yeah I never saw it like there no no because the visibility without it is shocking I still find it hard to imagine how four hundred men crammed into this small ship but we know they did this illustration completed the year after the ship sank gives a breakdown of the crew 185 soldiers which would have included archers 200 Mariners and 30 gunners who looked after the heavy cannon onboard in time of battle the soldiers marchers would have been on the top deck many of the Gunners would have been manning the big guns on the deck below where did you find the bodies I mean were they where you expected to find them soon the archers would have been on the top deck ready to shoot the French yes I mean they would mean you've been only on the top deck but we did find items of archery equipment all round the ship and we found human remains around the ship so what you can't do is say that everybody that was found on the upper deck was an archer or that all the archers were found on the upper deck you know there is a bit more of a mixture the mixture of skeletons is going to make this a much harder puzzle to crack find out more calls for a scientific study of the remains I want to see if it's possible to examine the skeletons and work out what jobs they did is there any way we can separate the archers from the sailors and the sailors from the Gunners I received a number of huge boxes and these were full of bows and they were in nests right as they were found set with a complete tick-tock the job of solving one of the biggest forensic puzzles underwater archaeologists had ever undertaken fell to osteo archaeologist and ster 'land because of the mix of bones no one knew exactly how many bodies there were and clearly I mean we found some skeletons where they were almost intact sometimes with clothing on and their material that many other cases you had pieces of your body all done with that order how on earth you start assembling a person from mass events like this well we've started with pairs because we are bilaterally symmetrical so we've got two thigh bones to shin bones two or bones etc so we started by matching or trying to match and bones that they recognized so there is a pair of thigh bones and if you look you can see that they go together quite well if you look at the bone you have to look at them very carefully but you can see that they match so they they belong to that and then we looked at the tibia a chin bone yeah so as we use our matching to build them together a little portion and symmetry that's right then we looked at the pelvis and because we can fit the femur into the pelvis and this is a right so that goes in there like that and you work your way up work our way up so you can start and build up the vertebra and set to work sorting the bones into individual skeletons from the thousands of bones it turned out we had the remains of 197 individuals but only 92 were complete enough to be reconstructed from these 92 I've selected three skeletons for further scientific investigation each has unique pathology that provides vital clues about who they were and one of them the shortest of the three may have contributed to the demise of the ship the first skeleton was found in the bow of the ship ninh area used as a store it's that of a man who was 6 feet tall to try to find out what he and the other two men looked like I've sent their skulls to medical artist Richard Neave his drawings of forensic Lee reconstructed faces have helped the police solve crimes the first challenge is to put flesh on the skull he uses modern measurements of flesh thickness collected from living people using ultrasound I'm attaching these small wax pegs lightly to the surface of the skull and they indicate the average thickness of soft tissue at these particular anatomical points the measurements are based on a series of white individuals between the ages of 20 and 29 and they will help to guide the amount of flesh if you like that is laid over the surface of the skull the pegs provide critical markers to enable Richard to construct the 3d map of the face what the first has to establish is the width of the nose and the position and width of the mouth putting an eye in place very quickly put the other eye in sketching by hand produces a likeness with far more character and the computer-generated reconstruction take the skyline out it was a very powerfully built man massive muscle insertions in the base of the skull and down the side of its face here the Beaton temporal is masseter muscles for chewing quite clear he was a big powerful solid kind of a guy great for the front row of the forwards something like that in rugby that kind of heavy heavy and beefy kind of guy this description of a big muscular man could fit most of the crew to help find out what this man did on the ship I've sought the advice of osteo archaeologist ROS drew she has studied ancient skeletons from around the world okay so this is a big guy in the prime of life any clues then as to what this man did for a living offhand I'd say the most striking where was done on his shoulders with his shoulder blades this thing here is called the acromion and your your clavicle your collarbone travels from the sternum to the acromion well the acromion is missing its tip bones fuse as you age and the tip chooses on after you're 1617 like that there's the tip and you can see put that kind of a bubbly appearance so that it was fused in life that only was soft tissue what stopped this joining as it should have done well I think it kept moving when it should have not been moving it was strained it was stressed actually some it was a lot of repeated load on it well whatever he was doing it was very strenuous to his shoulder area this rare disorder is known as us acro me ollie so what could cause this man shoulder blades to be in two parts in children the tip of the shoulder blade is joined the main part by a piece of soft cartilage this allows the shoulder joint expand as we grow when we become adults this cartridge fuses and becomes solid bone but in our skeleton this never happened and the shoulder blade remains in two pieces all secured meolli can be caused by repeated and heavy loading on the shoulders and our man wasn't the only person on the ship to have it 24 other shoulder blades were found with the same condition so what job on the mary-rose could cause it to happen climbing the rigging looks like one possibility sailors would use their arms to support themselves but the loads don't look great enough they take most of their weight on their legs so if our man is not a sailor what other jobs would fit the evidence [Music] one of the most surprising finds on the Mary Rose was the huge number of long bows and arrows 172 bows and over four thousand arrows many of the soldiers on board must have been arches could our man be one of them pulling a heavy bow requires a lot of strength it's just the sort of activity that could cause this disorder the only problem is that modern archers don't appear to suffer from this condition but perhaps putting a Tudor wore bow put more strain on the shoulder Steve Stratton is a Bowyer he's gone to great lengths to make an exact replica of a bow from the Mary Rose most people believe that the yew trees in this country were used for making bows well they were but not for something a powerful war bow Henry d8 wanted the best weapons for his archers and that meant importing the right type of wood from Europe most of it would have been Mediterranean mountain view above 3000 metres altitude and that is what you want for a very good boat massive power in it this test measures the force needed to pull this replica to Dabo its draw weight is a massive 170 pounds over three times the weight of a modern Olympic bow so could pulling wall bows like this cause the solder injury we see in the mary-rose skeletons only a handful of people today have the strength and technique to pull these bows mark stressin is one of them you're actually physically drawing 170 pounds you know that that's like picking up a 16 stone person with your fingertips more calls the Guinness World Record for pulling the strongest bow but the record came at a price over the last two years I've started to have problems with my left shoulder which is largely down to the huge compressive forces that's been inflicted by the boat so could Mowgli suffering from the same condition as on Mary Rose skeleton can I take that yeah you're suffering sorry yeah well I'm this one that was that okay to check this theory I'm putting mark through an MRI machine to see if his shoulder bone is in two sections [Music] slice by slice the magnetic resonance imaging machine builds up a picture of Mark's shoulder this looks very much like a repetitive type of injury pattern rather than one particularly big injury market Ferris our dad is a leading orthopedic surgeon from the scan he can tell if Mark has off a crow me alley and you can see this is a sort of relatively warm 20r both having a problem in that little joint on top of the shoulder something that's easily solved so I'm not ready for the scrap heap just yet no no no I think you are the way to go so fast you've looked at Mark's shoulder with this magnetic resonance scan has he got us to chroma alley as our archers we think had he doesn't have also come early but he has pathology in the same area and so you could say that he's got a problem in that exact same region but he doesn't have a cycle really wished to fake typically that's the problem that would have developed in childhood it's a failure of a growth plate diffuse so the hydrants him we might hypothesize is that marks started loading this guy's and when that had already fused but if he'd started doing this when he was six or seven or eight that actually maybe we could hypothesize and it's only hypothesis but we could say that if you do this sort of thing at a young age rather than getting the damage that you've got in the joint you've got failure of the growth plates to heal properly in Henry the eighth's time the longbow with its armor-piercing power was still a key part of Britain's the but it was only as good as the men drawing the bows to guarantee an army of powerful archers English law required male children to practice archery every week when young archers drew a heavy war bow the tip of the shoulder blade would be constantly pushed or pulled it would never stay still long enough to fuse into bone and would remain in two pieces from the evidence after a skeleton is almost certainly that of a tutor Archer the position of his body in the hole suggests he was collecting supplies when the ship sank down here he had no chance of escape but what about our other two skeletons the bones of our second man suggest an unusually brutal life on board the mary-rose while our third man might have been one of those responsible for failing to save the ship trapped deep in the hold of the mary-rose in the galley the ship's kitchen divers found the skeleton of a man about 5 foot 4 inches tall he was discovered with one of his shoes still intact a knife handle and a comb [Music] his body lay among scattered bricks all thus left of the ship's oven if he lived and died where he was found he could have been a cook and if he was a cook then we may even have his name one of the wooden eating bowls recovered from the Mary Rose is carved with the words Nikon cook could this have belonged to our skeleton could these be the remains of my cop what does medical artist Richard Neave think he looked like our second chef well he was a young man 20-something and by all appearances he was very healthy very strong he would have had this kind of youthful appearance unless there's been some dreadful period in their life where they've been malnourished and so on and so forth the ravages of time haven't taken their toll what the boy was telling about I was keen to learn what osteo archaeologist ROS drew would make of this younger man did he have the physique of a cook one of the first things that struck me when I when I met him if you will was that he had ripped both kneecaps rather dramatically well before he died because they had healed as best they could but the ligament that would cover that would go from the tibia the shin bone on up here are just ripped and torn there even away from the body of the bone so whatever he did he did at the same time with an equal strain to both legs this is osteoarthritis he's got evidence here that he was doing too much lifting when he was younger on his vertebrae these back bones again that's the back bones he's wearing himself out really disco oh he really is and this the collar bone the ligament underneath that attaches it to the breastbone is again it's heavily eroded it's just a big gaping hole that's the ligament that's been deeply strained goodness gracious I mean this bloke would have been suffering memory is already getting arthritis he's going to be aches and pains quite as well seriously whatever he did was a very hard labour this man has some terrible injuries for someone still in his twenties whatever he did it was probably more physical than being a cook to investigate further what his job might be we put his bones through a CT scanner from my own medical research I know that exercise can alter the shape of bones the x-ray slices of his upper arm bones can tell us how much he was using them so he goes through you can see that the bone shafts are actually pretty sick this isn't disease as making it thick this is the bone that's got six because it was being stressed as he grown to become strong yes bones thickness will be but Rosa's noticed something else about his arm bones this is a very symmetrical and they're sick right so this is again heavy loading both sides at once yes whatever he was doing he was doing it evenly on both arms I really lean more toward a heavy heavy objects that are being lifted with both arms or pushed with both arms handled with both arms equally the symmetry of his arm bones provides a clue to his occupation there was some thought that he might have been associated with the kitchen because he was found down in the hold near the kitchen area and his big cauldrons and he would think that feeding accrued the heavy duty work but I also think it'd be very asymmetrical or unbalanced what you'd be doing we'd be shopping with one hand you would probably pick up heavy things with both arms I'm sure but you'd still do more with one arm than the other and his bones are really very even so given what we know of this skeleton any guesses is what he might have been what do you say he did I would really want to say gunner because of the heavy loads involved with doing the gunning so potentially a gunner but potentially a gunner yes [Music] if you want to find the nearest equivalent to a mary-rose gunner today look no further than Colin Harriet camp i'ma cart Fred he's worked with cannon for nearly half his life he's fascinated by the power of these explosive weapons and the ball frickin Prime get in fire he knows how lethal they can be good shot smashed it there's these splinters size of that jab it's got to be a meter long or more jagged end take a man's head off all right all right but the 71 big guns on board the Mary Rose were not just lethal to the enemy their weight made them extremely dangerous to the sailors drafted in to fire them water up working the guns when you were in action was a pretty hairy business lots of opportunity for injury and instant death okay two three bees to hold it again two three we're good push you got moving death you've got sometimes a slippery depth every chance of injury whatever you're doing because it's heavy heavy metal you have to manually lift the gun up or on a couple of cross pikes lift it up put in position you've only got to put two foot wrong snap cartilages ligaments or go Colin has many of the injuries we see in our second skeleton I've been working with cannons 22 years now I'm deaf as I said and riddled with arthritis because of moving of the guns but me there is completely shot and two big qualities and my ID was in Tudor times and bury me at sea long ago firing our sailors injury is consistent with an accident lifting the heavy breach of one of the wrought iron guns if the other end of the breech was dropped his bent legs would suddenly take all the weight the instant load would tear off his kneecaps the injury would leave torn ligaments that would eventually turn to bone just like those in our skeleton this man's bones are consistent with him being a gunner for much of his time on the ship but once injured it's unlikely he performed most physical work our first two skeletons were found in the hole our last skeleton was discovered in a location that places him at the center of the action the main dexter mary-rose contains the gun and the gun crews 17 skeletons were found here one of the most complete was the body of this man he was shorter than average but what makes him special is that he was found next to a bosons call a whistle used for issuing commands it implies he was not a second which means he may have played a critically part in the last moments of the shed he may well have been the officer responsible for deploying cannons and for opening and shutting the gun ports water pouring in through these gun ports thank the shed why the crew failed to close them is at the heart of this mystery [Music] could the stainer of command rest on this man's shoulders and his bones confirm that he was an officer this individual is older than some of the other skeletons I have seen what sort of age do you think you might sit hello I think he was in his late 30s into his 40s the things that would indicate to me that someone has achieved at least at the age of 30 the way his his collarbones are fused but also his teeth he's got bad teeth which can happen at any age there's a rotten stump there's an abscess over here the teeth are very worn down and you can see dentin here is where the enamel has been worn away and actually exposes the dentin this man's age is consistent with him being someone in charge but there's more of his life story edge to his bones here is his collarbone let's look at that one that's the underneath part that would have attached to the breastbone and you've got the collarbone from the younger fellow with the ripped kneecaps right there really varied if they're very different aren't they this one's got a great because of divot acid yes it does that the muscles the ligaments rather pulling on this damaged the bone you can see that no this one it did at one time but it's still then just healed its healed it is healed this guy's still doing heavy manual labor that's continuing to injure the bone this guy's done some manual labor in the past and he's now stopped this guy's had a more sedentary life recently yes yes okay what sort of jobs this guy did and he obviously wasn't a gunner or working on the rigging well I don't think they had any totally useless people on the Shinra so if he wasn't the doctor or something like that you would have to say he was perhaps in a supervisory position the bones are consistent with a man who worked his way up through the ranks to the position of an officer he was not a senior officer they would have come from the aristocracy he was almost certainly the ship's bosun who master gunner he was an older man more mature than the others and but likely to be more experienced and possibly somebody to whom they turn when things went a little bit wrong his face was a different shape slightly more rounded slightly more refined nose and from an of course he'd been a sea for most of his life probably fresh air wind Sun all that would have worked on his face so that the creases around the nose and the mouth and the eyes and so on would be that much more heavily marked our man was found on the main deck the gun ports here were close to the waterline which made the ship extremely vulnerable did something under his control go wrong here that caused the ship to sink [Music] maritime archaeologist Alex Hildred has investigated the final moments of the Mary Rose what's happened to the ship rested on the actions of those on the gun deck how close the water would we Aviv about just over a meter from from the waterline here that seems pretty dangerous to me well it is and that's probably why she sank and that's another reason to suggest it when the ship heeled having fired around you know it's entirely consistent with the fat water would have come through the gun ports and overwhelmed the ship and the gun port leads were open you know they were found open and hinged against the back of the ship the water starts trickling in we've never had it you're beginning to go over in a big way and so the gun port lids would have been raised and lowered by some poor fellow standing above and these were heavy well 55 kilos 50 kilos and pulling against off ship that's moving it's quite a long way over and having to pull this down at the behest of the master gunner when there's all sorts of noise happening with the only communication being through a ventilation shaft there and that there's no wonder they didn't manage to shut the lid [Music] [Applause] [Music] in the chaos of battle with all the shouting and guns going on it would have taken a very clear chain of command and a very disciplined well rehearsed crude to close the gun ports in time [Music] so how closely knit must the crew of the Mary Rose were they a well drilled team that have trained together or was there some problem in the chain of command forensic science is about to reveal a startling discovery that may rewrite the story of the mary-rose [Music] to pinpoint the geographical origins of our three crew members we've sent the skulls to undergo an innovative test with forensic expert Lynne Bell we're going to sample the enamel so I show you it's a very small sample you can barely see it when we take it so we aim for the molars yeah and we just saw and pull one and what can you tell from that when you've analyzed it we can hope to regionalize that so you might be able to as an idea of where these people came from yes at Bradford University Lynn's colleague professor junior leaf thought extract enamel from our three skeletons the composition of our team varies according to where we lived as children it depends on the type of water we consumed during the time our teeth performing water molecules and clouds come in different forms some water molecules contain heavy atoms oxygen others light oxygen atoms when it rains the cloud releases more of the heavy type in warmer regions this means the water in the soil varies slightly from place to place and these differences can be plotted on a map the water in the soil is absorbed into the plants we eat and in growing children eventually find its way instead teeth [Music] using a mass spectrometer Julia and Lynn can determine roughly where our three men lived when they were young five skeleton we got a number of - 5.5 an object larger this is the potential option we look at 5.5 that puts him tightly into British range there's no doubt about here I could be southwest England or southwest Wales as me yes that's right and the next one oh the bosun core point six four point six they're quite different yeah not much of it is there is no you have to be right down here it's very much on the edge this will serve this island all laugh West England little normal and then so this is our potential gunner this is the gunner all of 4.5 and this is an interesting value yes very low we don't really see a 4.5 on this map right so he mut he might not be a native Brit he may not be Lynn has also analysed a larger sample of crew members usual aging skeletons overall how is that compared to the distribution of the other skeleton as well it compares really well because of my sample of 18 potentially 60% of the crew was a bridge on that day extraordinary and upwards of a half of the crew of mayrose might not have been native Brits what 1/3 to 2/3 actually was a huge surprise to me I was expecting them all to be British that was my expectation and because I always had no idea these were just in heart of oh because it were British crewmen if these men weren't British where did they come from and what were they doing on this quintessentially English warship the analysis of the teeth rules out Britain and countries in Northern Europe it suggests that the men grew up in a warmer climate probably somewhere in southern Europe it's also known but at this time Henry the eighth's was shorter school soldiers and sailors and was trying to recruit mercenaries from the continent in Henry State Papers there's one account in particular this appears to fit the evidence six months before the mary-rose sank nine ships were caught in a storm in the English Channel they sought refuge in starless Harbor in Cornwall and on board were 600 Spanish soldiers starving and out of money they were pressed into service for England it's possible that some of these men were on the Mary Rose the discovery that up to 60% of the crew came from overseas offers a new explanation of why she sank I have the nays I cannot rule yes that strange remark made by the captain just before the sinking and it really does for me it just conjured up a picture of a zoo really as languages well you certainly wonder the the both deep scars hanging over water started coming in your chances of being able to anything to rectify that if actually you can't even communicate properly with your krüger 60 percent of them don't speak fluent English potentially I think it's a recipe for disaster we may never know exactly what happens below decks as the Mary Rose sank but the bones reveal the hidden story about their crew the men who died here on that summer's day in 1545 were mix of sailors from Britain and men far from home the sight of those trapped skeletons left an enduring impression on me [Music] how many of those men from southern climes could have imagined they would end their days on a warship fighting and dying for the King of England you

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Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 465,344

Rating: 4.7963414 out of 5

Keywords: Mysteries of history, documentary history, Full length Documentaries, Documentaries, Full Documentary, Channel 4 documentary, Documentary Movies - Topic, History, British history, Documentary, Forensics, history documentary, 2017 documentary, real, Ghosts, Mary Rose, TV Shows - Topic, BBC documentary, stories

Id: v-4qXi8kXTs

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Length: 44min 34sec (2674 seconds)

Published: Fri May 12 2017

Reddit Comments

With the use of science, 3 men are identified on one of the most famous shipwrecks of all time!

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/thebigmack 📅︎︎ Jul 25 2019 🗫︎ replies

Interesting. Might have been easier with a magic watch though.

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/BastMatt95 📅︎︎ Jul 26 2019 🗫︎ replies