They opened a whole new world to me, the world not just of the ship in all its extraordinary and intricate detail – for Tudor warships were at the cutting edge of technical and engineering knowledge – but, and, for me even more compellingly, the world of the men who served on board the ship.įor, along with the Mary Rose, divers working in the often murky and dangerous conditions have also recovered from beneath the silt, over the years, probably the best collection of Tudor artefacts anywhere in the world. Having written the first, outline draft of the story, I visited the Mary Rose Museum again and made contact with its expert and devoted staff. I had seen, on television, the remains of the ship lifted from the seabed in 1982, and had visited it in Portsmouth – visible only through a window at a distance, for the timbers had to be sprayed constantly with water and chemicals to preserve them. I knew of course that the ship had sunk while sailing out to meet the French warships on a hot July day and that the lower half of the ship had been preserved, the silt at the bottom of the Solent serving to limit decay. When I conceived the idea of a Shardlake novel where the threads of the story would converge on board Henry VIII’s warship Mary Rose as it prepared to sail out to do battle with the approaching French fleet in July 1545, I had little idea of the sheer scale of the material that was available in Portsmouth.
0 kommentar(er)
