Several aspects of the Mary Rose story have long puzzled me. This is a brief note concerning two of them; neither of which is ever likely to be resolved satisfactorily.

The first is the absence of any recognition in the recent accounts that there is a letter setting out the testimony of a survivor, to the effect that the ship had actually opened fire on the French, and that that was why her ports were open; despite the sills being only sixteen inches from the water (on an even keel in harbour ?) in Ralegh's account (Invention of Shipping): "The Marie Rose, by a little sway of the ship in casting about, her ports being within sixteen inches of the waters, was overset and lost….."

The letter published by HMSO in 1904 (Spanish Calendar, VIII, No.101) is from Van der Delft to Charles V, dated 23/4 July, and is now in the Imperial Archives in Vienna. The most interesting part reads as follows:

"Towards evening, through misfortune and carelessness, the ship of Vice-Admiral George Carew foundered, and all hands on board, to the number of about 500, were drowned, with the exception of about five and twenty or thirty servants, sailors and the like, who escaped. I made enquiries of one of the survivors, a Fleming, how the ship perished, and he told me that the disaster was caused by their not having closed the lowest row of gun ports on one side of the ship. Having fired the guns on that side, the ship was turning, in order to fire from the other, when the wind caught her sails so strongly as to heel her over, and plunge her open gunports beneath the water, which flooded and sank her. They say however that they can recover the ship and guns."

There is no reason to doubt the accuracy of this contemporary account - other than that we can no more disprove the French version, that she was sunk by their gunfire. However, taken at face value the independent contemporary evidence of a Fleming, a survivor, and an Ambassador who also witnessed the event ought to as reliable as any we have. It is not sufficient to argue against their story that many or all of the guns recovered were loaded: we cannot with certainty distinguish between loaded and re-loaded; and we not have all the guns which we could have expected to have been found on the lower deck.

The loss of ships from having their ports open, even in harbour, was actually a common occurrence in the sixteenth century. The classic account of a near-disaster is that of Richard Hawkins from 1593 (Observations….), concerning his new ship Dainty, in the Thames at Barking, though setting out for the Pacific: "for the wind being at ENE when they set sail, and veered out southerly, it forced them for the doubling of a point to bring their tack aboard, and luffing up; the wind freshening, suddenly the ship began to make a little heel; and for that she was very deep laden, and her ports open, water began to enter in at them, which nobody having regard unto, thinking themselves safe in the river, it augmented…..".

The second area of doubt concerns the emphasis placed on Sir Peter Carew's account of George Carew's alleged shouted conversation with his uncle Sir Gawain Carew: "He had in the ship a 100 mariners, the worst of them being able to be master in the best ship within the realme, and those so maligned and disdained one another that refusing to do that which they should do were careless to do that which they ought to do, so contending in envy perished in frowardness".

I remain sceptical that gathering the finest seamen into the Rose led to fatal rivalries: that also ignores the real problem of freeboard, and the observed and demonstrable lack of stability (still only analysed, as far as I am aware, by John Coates, with preliminary data in 1984). Quite apart from the maritime issues, would a Tudor nobleman be likely to bellow across the water that "he had the sort of knaves whom he could not rule" ?

I offer another hypothesis: that those prime seamen were well aware that the Rose would be unstable under sail. It is quite unnecessary to know the theory of metacentric height to know that a ship has been made less stable. The period of her roll will become much slower as she is loaded deeper, with weights too high in the ship. Is the germ of the story that these prime seamen had tried to warn Carew about the result of military meddling with the ship's stability ? The records of numbers aboard of 700 (or only 500, above), compared with Anthony's complement of 415, do suggest some overcrowding at the last minute, with results predicted by the master of Gawain Carew's ship in the same account.

There was actually another interesting eyewitness to the loss of the Mary Rose: a Portuguese expert on navigation and shipbuilding - but that is another story.