Scientists Attempt To Uncover Why The Mary Rose Sank | Absolute History

the sinking of Henry the eighth's mighty warship the mary-rose remains one of our greatest maritime mysteries what 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 fine offers a completely original explanation of why the Mary Rose sank [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 and 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 carry out research at University College London my later research is focused on how bones change with exercise and with injury patterns and you can actually learn a lot about a person from the way the skeleton is so that's my passion Ayers 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 a sensation the mary-rose was Britain's Pompeii a moment of life frozen in time up to now attention is focused on these objects but what both fascinated and appalled the divers were the human remains ribs and a leather jerkin and home to me you know this was 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 a body try absolute underneath it that's when you think you realize how that person died he was caught with his arms beneath wasn't it you and and you imagined this poor fellow trapped under this probably a ton of bronze in his last moments trying to shift it of course they can't have thought when they set out that that was what they held for him 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 and 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 barbar to engage in 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 is it true no it said that Henriette could hear the screams and answers only across across the water the sound travels over there it is literally just a mile over to South Sea canal so when she sank the mast the main mast in the foremast were up above the surface of the wing to hear at this point she sank this is the boy marking the site motion-sensing there's Henry Yates sunning there 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 term too tightly possibly with too much sails set so some disorganization on board so George Carew was shouting across to one of the other English ships that he had the sort of knaves that he could not rule knaves whom he could not rule the last reported words from the Admiral on board the Mary Rose appeared 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 if 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 [Music] in 1982 after removing the contents of the ship the Mary Rose trust raised her to the surface this black ship of Henry the eighth's it's the first time we have seen this in 437 years what an amazing sight this oak hull 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 knaves who he could not control had they somehow contributed to the sinking of the ship to help play 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 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 on board in time of battle the soldiers and archers would have been on the top deck many of the Gunners would have been manning the big guns on the deck below where do you find the bodies I mean were they where you expected to find them but 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 decks but we did find items of archery equipment all round the ship and we found human remains all round 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 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 to 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 bones and they were in Nets right as they were found so it was a complete jigsaw the job of solving one of the biggest forensic puzzles underwater archaeologists had ever undertaken fell to osteo archaeologists and stern and 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 but many other cases you had pieces of your body yes so how on earth do you start assembling a person from mass opponents like this well we started with pairs because we are bilaterally symmetrical so it got to thighs to shin bones to our bones etc so we started by matching Oh trying to match recognize 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 bones 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 aged chin bone yeah so as reason matching to build them together get a portion and symmetry that's right then we looked at the pelvis 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 so you then start and build up the vertebra I'll set to work sorting the bones into individual skeletons from the thousands of bones it turned out we had the remains of a hundred and ninety-seven 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 storm [Music] it's that the man who was six 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 or 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 a 3d map of the face what the first half to establish is the width of the nose and the position and width of the mouth putting an eye in place fairly quickly is but the other eye in sketching by hand produces a likeness with far more character than the computer-generated reconstruction it was a very powerfully built man massive muscle insertions in the base of the skull and down the side of his face here the Beaton temporal is the master to muscles for chewing quite clear he was a big powerful solid kind of a guy great for the front row of the forward something like that in rugby that kind of heavy heavy 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 Rose Drew she has studied ancient skeletons from around the world okay so this is a big guy in the prime of life any clues there 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 fuses on after you're 1617 like that there's the tip and you can see it's got that kind of a bubbly appearance so that it was fused in life but only with soft tissue I want to stop 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 this was a lot of repeated load on this 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 to expand as we grow when we become adults this cartilage fuses and becomes solid bone but in our skeleton this never happened and the shoulder blade remained in two pieces [Music] Asik roomie Olli 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 this 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 job 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 pulling a Tudor wore bow put more strain on the shoulder Steve Stratton is a boyo 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 the eighth 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 you above 3000 meters altitude and that is what you want for a very good bow massive power in it this test measures the force needed to pull this replica to turbo its draw weight is a massive 170 pounds over three times the weight of a modern Olympic bow so could pulling wore bows like this cause the shoulder injury we see in the Mary Rose skeletons only a handful of people today have the strength and technique to pull these bows mark Stretton 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 mark holds 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 bow so could Marlee suffering from the same condition as on Mary Rose skeleton 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 marks shoulder this looks very much like a repetitive type of injury pattern rather than one particularly big ferrous our dad is a leading orthopedic surgeon from the scan he can tell if mark has a chrome e ollie and you can see this is relatively warm joint here but 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 though no no I think you had a way to go so far I mean you've looked at Mark's shoulder with this magnetic resonance scan has he got us a crow me ollie as our archers we think had he doesn't have also karoli 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 sacrum really wish to fake typically that's a problem that would have developed in childhood it's a failure of a growth plate diffuse so the difference here we might hypothesize is that marks started loading a skeleton 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 this 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 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 defense but it was only as good as the men drawing the bows to guarantee an army of powerful archers English door 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 our first skeleton is almost certainly that of a Tudor Archer the position of his body in the hold 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 suggests 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 two intact a knife handle and a comb [Music] his body lay among scattered bricks all was 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 my comp 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 a 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 I was keen to learn what osteo archaeologist Rose 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 ligaments 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 so these back bones again that the back bones so he's wearing himself out really disgust 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 oh I mean this blade would have been suffering presumed name and he's already getting arthritis he's gonna be aches and pains quite a lot Oh seriously whatever he did was a very hard labor 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 you go through you can see that the bone shafts are actually pretty thick this isn't disease there's making it thick this is bone that's got thick because it was being stressed it had grown to become strong yes but Rosa's noticed something else about his arm bones these are very symmetrical and they're thick all 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 I 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 has these big cauldrons and you would think that feeding a crude be heavy duty work but I also think it would be very asymmetrical or unbalanced what you'd be doing would be chopping with one hand you you would probably pick up heavy things with both arms I'm sure but you'd still do more with with one arm than the other and his bones are really very even so given what we know of this Gutterson any guesses 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 I got it but potentially a gunner yes if you want to find the nearest equivalent to a mary-rose gunner today look no further than Colin Harriette [Music] he's worked with Cannon and for nearly half his life he's fascinated by the power of these explosive weapons trick and prime give him fire he knows how lethal they can be good shot smashed it and if these splinters that's got to be a meter long or more jagged end take a man's head off 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 too far them water up working the guns when you were in action it was a pretty hairy business lots of opportunity for injury and instant death okay two three 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 on a couple of cross pikes lift it up put it in position you've only got to put your foot wrong snap cartilages ligaments all 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 I'm riddled with arthritis because of moving of the guns but knee there is completely shot and to be quoted at my age if I was in Tudor times they'd 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 breach 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 the most physical work our first two skeletons were found in the hold our last skeleton was discovered in a location that places him at the center of the action the main deck of the Mary Rose contained the guns 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 an officer 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 sank the Chevy why the crew failed to close them is at the heart of this mystery [Music] could the failure of command rest on this man's shoulders can his bones confirm that he was an officer this individual is older than some of the other skeletons I've seen what sort of age do we think he might've oh 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 fetched in his bones here's 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 they're really very diff they're very different aren't they so this one's got a great because of divot aspect yes it does the the muscles the ligaments rather pulling on this damage the bone you can see that and on this one it did at one time but it's filled in it says healed it's healed it is healed so this guy is 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 job did this guy do then he obviously wasn't a gunner or or working on the rigging well I don't think they had any totally useless people on the show so um 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 will 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 turned 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's been at 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 gunports 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 happened to the ship rested on the actions of those on the gun deck how close the water would we have been about just over a meter from from the waters that tiny here that seems pretty dangerous to me well it is and that's probably why she sank and that's another reason to suggest that when the ship heeled having fired around you know it's 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 so some water starts trickling in we've never had it you're beginning to go over in a big way and so the the 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 a 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 it'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 off 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 was the crew of the mary-rose were they a well-drilled team that had 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'll show you it's a very small sample you can barely see it when we take it mm-hmm so we aim for the molars yeah and we just saw and pour well and what can you tell from that when you've analyzed it we can hope to regionalize sample so you might be able to go as an idea of where these people came from yes at Bradford University Lynn's colleague professor Junior Lee for extract enamel from our three skeletons the composition of our teeth varies according to where we lived as children it depends on the type of water we consumed during the time our teeth were forming water molecules and clouds come in different forms some water molecules contain heavy atoms of 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 into their teeth [Music] using a mass spectrometer Julia and Lynn can determine roughly where our three men lived when they were young [Music] first skeleton we got a number of minus five point five senses are potential Archer it's just the potential archer we look at five point five that puts him tightly into British range there's no doubt about him it could be southwest England or southwest Wales isn't it yes that's right and the next one oh the bosun goal point six four point six they're quite different yeah not much of it is there you'd have to be right down here I mean it's very much on the edge so some southwest island or southwest England and then so this is our potential gunner this is the gunner warned of 4.5 and this is an interesting value we don't really see a 4.5 on this map right so he might he might not be a native Brit Lynn has also analyzed a larger sample of crew members you've looked at 18 skeletons overall how does that compare to the distribution of the other scanner tips well it compares really well because of my sample of 18 potentially 60% of the crew wasn't British on that day extraordinaire and upwards of a half of the crew of mayrose might not have been native Brits well third to two thirds actually it was a huge surprise to me I was expecting them all to be British that was my expectation and line because I always had this idea these were just hard to vote 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 that at this time Henry the eighth was short of skilled soldiers and sailors and was trying to recruit mercenaries from the continent in Henry state papers there's one account in particular that 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 Falmouth 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 naves I cannot rule yes that strange remark made by the captain yeah just before the sinking I mean it really does for me it just conjured up a picture of the zoo really of languages you know what he certainly wonder that if the boat did start here and water started coming in your chances of being able to anything to rectify that if actually you can't even communicate properly with your crew cos sixty percent of them don't speak fluent English potentially I think it's a recipe for disaster we may never know exactly what happened below decks as the mary-rose sank but the bones reveal the hidden story about her crew the men who died here on that summer's day in 1545 were a 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 can have imagined they would end their days on a warship fighting and dying for the king of England you

Channel: Absolute History

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Id: xpTlA7NHG5w

Length: 44min 33sec (2673 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 29 2019