It was a bitterly cold October morning, and hundreds of spectators were huddled on the Southsea Promenade at Portsmouth. Out in the Solent, dozens more stared from a flotilla of boats at a spot on the choppy surface beneath the shadow of a floating crane.
Finally, at 9.03am, a first fractured timber broke the surface, like the femur of some fossilised sea monster. The next three hours would see the culmination of one of the most ambitious archaeological salvage operations of modern times, as Henry VIII's flagship, the Mary Rose, was hauled 50 feet up from the seabed.
Watched by 60 million viewers worldwide, coverage of the raising of the Mary Rose on 11 October 1982, was historic on many counts. BBC2 cleared its schedules for the first-ever underwater live broadcast, as the hull of a ship sunk in 1545 while returning fire at an invading French fleet was dragged into dry dock.
The £4m salvage of the 150-foot warship, 17 years after naval historian Alexander McKee had set out to find it on little more than a hunch, represented a triumph for the 500-strong team of archaeologists, divers and amateurs whose determination made it possible.
But dramatic though this spectacle was, it was only the start of the Mary Rose conservation story. As 500,000 visitors a year peer through misted windows from the gallery overlooking the wreck, conservators are engaged in a continuous battle to stabilise its waterlogged structure.
Now on the 25th anniversary of the salvage operation, the Mary Rose Trust, the charity set up to preserve the hull and the 19,000 objects dredged up with it, faces its most daunting challenge: financing a £36m conservation plan vital to the ship's, and its own, survival.
The development - contingent on a £21m Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) bid, whose outcome should be known in January - will involve the dry dock containing the hull being encompassed in an egg-shaped structure designed by Wilkinson Eyre Architects. Original timbers and the ship's giant anchors will be reinstated. Its interior will be opened up to full public view, alongside a "mirror image" of three of the four decks, containing original artefacts and facsimiles of some of the 500 crew who perished.
But first the hull must be strengthened. During the decade following its salvage it was sprayed with chalk water in lieu of sufficient funding to buy polyethylene glycol, the chemical now used to replace the seawater in its timbers, preventing them collapsing because of damage caused by bacteria and rusting iron. The final stage of this process will see the hull "baked dry" so that, by 2016, the viewing windows can be opened.
Nits and all
The project will also improve visitors' experience in other ways. At present, the Mary Rose Museum, which houses 1,000 of the best-preserved finds including a surgeon's cap, tiny bone dice and combs containing traces of sailors' nits, is separated from the hull. As a result, many people never get round to visiting both the ship and collection. Under the new plan, the two will be united at the revamped dock.
Though the trust's initial, more modest, HLF bid was rejected last year, the omens look good this time. So good, in fact, that the Garfield Weston Foundation has just handed the Mary Rose Trust a cheque for £1m. "They are convinced we are on to a winner," says trust chief executive John Lippiett. "If we go on without this project, the trust is unsustainable. Conservation costs us £400,000 a year."
The trust's story is an object lesson in the painstaking efforts it takes small maritime charities and museums to conserve their collections in the absence of core government funding. But to what extent do the conservation challenges posed by wrecks that have lain under the sea for centuries reflect those faced by historic vessels still afloat?
Structurally, the Mary Rose masterplan mirrors the approach adopted for our two other most celebrated vessels, the Cutty Sark and ss Great Britain - the construction of covered dry docks with controlled conditions designed to minimise future deterioration. The Greenwich-based clipper will be encased in a glass "bubble" when its £25m facelift is completed in 2009 (a year behind schedule, due to the suspected arson attack in May).
In Bristol, the £11.3m installation in 2005 of a "glass sea" at the waterline of the world's first ocean liner, beneath which humidity is regulated at 20 per cent, earned ss Great Britain last year's Gulbenkian Prize.
Matthew Tanner, the director of the ss Great Britain Trust, says elaborate protection is needed because the nature of nautical objects leaves them more fragile than other archaeological finds. "They are more susceptible because they have been so exposed to the elements," he says. "The Great Britain's issue is salt corrosion. Before 2005, she was collapsing into the dock and may have lasted only 20 more years."
Tanner adds that maritime conservation has historically been flawed as, due to the practicalities of finding adequate storage, many ships have been kept in the open, increasing the likelihood of further decay. More seaworthy vessels, meanwhile, have been recommissioned and altered.
"Ships have been refitted until there is very little of the original left, so you end up with a replica, by default," he says. "Our view is that as ships get older you have to change the way you think about them. The Great Britain's conservation plan focuses on preservation, not reconstruction."
Caring for fragile vessels is costly. The prohibitive cost of conserving HMS Carrick (aka City of Adelaide), the only listed British ship besides the Cutty Sark, has forced its owner, the Scottish Maritime Museum, to seek permission to "deconstruct" it scientifically. The application, initially rejected, was approved in principle by Historic Scotland earlier this year - despite petitions from, among others, the Australian government.
"She's a risk to us," says director David Thomson. "We have a small budget, and the liabilities associated with her are enormous." Aside from money, the museum suffers from another shortage often cited by maritime curators: the specialist skills needed to carry out restoration. Former director Jim Tildesley says: "With a large maritime object, you need the same skills that built it."
The Cutty Sark Trust is trying to plug this skills gap by training artisans in traditional nautical crafts as part of its own conservation plan, and contracting them out to boost income.
Underwater heritage
But what of the plight of the numerous wrecks languishing on the seabed? The legal stand-off between Spain and the privately owned US salvage boat Odyssey Marine over a ship laden with gold coins that may be the Spanish frigate Mercedes is prompting renewed calls for the British government to ratify the 2001 Unesco Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage.
Under present sea law, the principle of "sovereign immunity" accords ownership of non-merchant flagged wrecks, wherever they are found, to their countries of origin. In addition, coastal states have a notional duty to safeguard all wrecks located in their "territorial waters".
This rule induced Britain to pass the 1973 Protection of Wrecks Act, which covers 50 named vessels. But in practice, advances in technology, combined with the huge resources wielded by today's treasure-hunters and "commercial archaeologists", makes it difficult to police.
The Unesco convention offers greater protection, requiring signatories to actively protect every archaeological site more than 100 years old in their waters. It's the sweeping nature of this article that is deterring Britain from signing, says a Department for Culture, Media and Sport spokeswoman:
"The government interprets the convention as requiring the protection of all underwater cultural heritage (there are an estimated 10,000 sites in British waters), which is neither desirable nor practical."
As the situation stands, some believe it is only a matter of time before another Mary Rose is seized by private salvers with no interest in anything other than the value of their haul.
Mike Williams, the honorary secretary of the Nautical Archaeology Society and lecturer in maritime law at the University of Wolverhampton, says: "Technical advances mean nothing is now undiscoverable. We are facing an unprecedented threat to our underwater heritage."
James Morrison is a freelance journalist
Finally, at 9.03am, a first fractured timber broke the surface, like the femur of some fossilised sea monster. The next three hours would see the culmination of one of the most ambitious archaeological salvage operations of modern times, as Henry VIII's flagship, the Mary Rose, was hauled 50 feet up from the seabed.
Watched by 60 million viewers worldwide, coverage of the raising of the Mary Rose on 11 October 1982, was historic on many counts. BBC2 cleared its schedules for the first-ever underwater live broadcast, as the hull of a ship sunk in 1545 while returning fire at an invading French fleet was dragged into dry dock.
The £4m salvage of the 150-foot warship, 17 years after naval historian Alexander McKee had set out to find it on little more than a hunch, represented a triumph for the 500-strong team of archaeologists, divers and amateurs whose determination made it possible.
But dramatic though this spectacle was, it was only the start of the Mary Rose conservation story. As 500,000 visitors a year peer through misted windows from the gallery overlooking the wreck, conservators are engaged in a continuous battle to stabilise its waterlogged structure.
Now on the 25th anniversary of the salvage operation, the Mary Rose Trust, the charity set up to preserve the hull and the 19,000 objects dredged up with it, faces its most daunting challenge: financing a £36m conservation plan vital to the ship's, and its own, survival.
The development - contingent on a £21m Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) bid, whose outcome should be known in January - will involve the dry dock containing the hull being encompassed in an egg-shaped structure designed by Wilkinson Eyre Architects. Original timbers and the ship's giant anchors will be reinstated. Its interior will be opened up to full public view, alongside a "mirror image" of three of the four decks, containing original artefacts and facsimiles of some of the 500 crew who perished.
But first the hull must be strengthened. During the decade following its salvage it was sprayed with chalk water in lieu of sufficient funding to buy polyethylene glycol, the chemical now used to replace the seawater in its timbers, preventing them collapsing because of damage caused by bacteria and rusting iron. The final stage of this process will see the hull "baked dry" so that, by 2016, the viewing windows can be opened.
Nits and all
The project will also improve visitors' experience in other ways. At present, the Mary Rose Museum, which houses 1,000 of the best-preserved finds including a surgeon's cap, tiny bone dice and combs containing traces of sailors' nits, is separated from the hull. As a result, many people never get round to visiting both the ship and collection. Under the new plan, the two will be united at the revamped dock.
Though the trust's initial, more modest, HLF bid was rejected last year, the omens look good this time. So good, in fact, that the Garfield Weston Foundation has just handed the Mary Rose Trust a cheque for £1m. "They are convinced we are on to a winner," says trust chief executive John Lippiett. "If we go on without this project, the trust is unsustainable. Conservation costs us £400,000 a year."
The trust's story is an object lesson in the painstaking efforts it takes small maritime charities and museums to conserve their collections in the absence of core government funding. But to what extent do the conservation challenges posed by wrecks that have lain under the sea for centuries reflect those faced by historic vessels still afloat?
Structurally, the Mary Rose masterplan mirrors the approach adopted for our two other most celebrated vessels, the Cutty Sark and ss Great Britain - the construction of covered dry docks with controlled conditions designed to minimise future deterioration. The Greenwich-based clipper will be encased in a glass "bubble" when its £25m facelift is completed in 2009 (a year behind schedule, due to the suspected arson attack in May).
In Bristol, the £11.3m installation in 2005 of a "glass sea" at the waterline of the world's first ocean liner, beneath which humidity is regulated at 20 per cent, earned ss Great Britain last year's Gulbenkian Prize.
Matthew Tanner, the director of the ss Great Britain Trust, says elaborate protection is needed because the nature of nautical objects leaves them more fragile than other archaeological finds. "They are more susceptible because they have been so exposed to the elements," he says. "The Great Britain's issue is salt corrosion. Before 2005, she was collapsing into the dock and may have lasted only 20 more years."
Tanner adds that maritime conservation has historically been flawed as, due to the practicalities of finding adequate storage, many ships have been kept in the open, increasing the likelihood of further decay. More seaworthy vessels, meanwhile, have been recommissioned and altered.
"Ships have been refitted until there is very little of the original left, so you end up with a replica, by default," he says. "Our view is that as ships get older you have to change the way you think about them. The Great Britain's conservation plan focuses on preservation, not reconstruction."
Caring for fragile vessels is costly. The prohibitive cost of conserving HMS Carrick (aka City of Adelaide), the only listed British ship besides the Cutty Sark, has forced its owner, the Scottish Maritime Museum, to seek permission to "deconstruct" it scientifically. The application, initially rejected, was approved in principle by Historic Scotland earlier this year - despite petitions from, among others, the Australian government.
"She's a risk to us," says director David Thomson. "We have a small budget, and the liabilities associated with her are enormous." Aside from money, the museum suffers from another shortage often cited by maritime curators: the specialist skills needed to carry out restoration. Former director Jim Tildesley says: "With a large maritime object, you need the same skills that built it."
The Cutty Sark Trust is trying to plug this skills gap by training artisans in traditional nautical crafts as part of its own conservation plan, and contracting them out to boost income.
Underwater heritage
But what of the plight of the numerous wrecks languishing on the seabed? The legal stand-off between Spain and the privately owned US salvage boat Odyssey Marine over a ship laden with gold coins that may be the Spanish frigate Mercedes is prompting renewed calls for the British government to ratify the 2001 Unesco Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage.
Under present sea law, the principle of "sovereign immunity" accords ownership of non-merchant flagged wrecks, wherever they are found, to their countries of origin. In addition, coastal states have a notional duty to safeguard all wrecks located in their "territorial waters".
This rule induced Britain to pass the 1973 Protection of Wrecks Act, which covers 50 named vessels. But in practice, advances in technology, combined with the huge resources wielded by today's treasure-hunters and "commercial archaeologists", makes it difficult to police.
The Unesco convention offers greater protection, requiring signatories to actively protect every archaeological site more than 100 years old in their waters. It's the sweeping nature of this article that is deterring Britain from signing, says a Department for Culture, Media and Sport spokeswoman:
"The government interprets the convention as requiring the protection of all underwater cultural heritage (there are an estimated 10,000 sites in British waters), which is neither desirable nor practical."
As the situation stands, some believe it is only a matter of time before another Mary Rose is seized by private salvers with no interest in anything other than the value of their haul.
Mike Williams, the honorary secretary of the Nautical Archaeology Society and lecturer in maritime law at the University of Wolverhampton, says: "Technical advances mean nothing is now undiscoverable. We are facing an unprecedented threat to our underwater heritage."
James Morrison is a freelance journalist
