More than 400 years after sinking, Henry VIII’s prized Mary Rose has been recovered. The 600-ton warship was used during the Italian War of 1542-1546. During a defense effort, a combination of wind and flooded open gun ports led to the ship’s unfortunate descent to the bottom of the Solent waters in 1545. Francois van der Delft, Imperial ambassador and eyewitness to the sinking, wrote that the English boat had shipwrecked “through misfortune and carelessness.” Only about 40 of the 500 person crew survived. The Mary Rose was finally retrieved in 1982, and the discovery broke a Guinness World Record decades later. After 28,000 dives and years of research, more than 8,300 weapons, ordnances, and affiliated artifacts were salvaged—the most medieval weaponry ever recovered from a shipwreck. Researchers also uncovered thousands of other artifacts and the remains of 179 crew members. The Tudor warship now sits on display in the Portsmouth dockyard where it was built more than 470 years ago.
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