Beamy, ferociously armed, with big guns low in the hull, the Mary Rose opened the 450-year era of the ballleship. Here she is as shown in the Anthony Roll, a list of the King's ships compiled by an officer of the Board of Ordnance at the Tower ofLondon in 1546. When she comes up from the seabed this year, she will go on exhibition in Portsmouth, where HMS Victory of 1765 and HMS Warrior of 1860 will keep her company, along with ships of today's Royal Navy. Photo Š The Mary Rose Trust
The First Battleship When she was quite new, in 1513, Sir Edward Howard called her ''the flower I trow of all ships that ever sailed." Before the rediscovery of her hulk by the historian Alexander McKee little was known of her. "All that everyone agreed on," he has noted, "was that the Mary Rose had been a 'key' vessel in the startingly rapid evolution of the wooden battleship as a floating gun platform." The tremendous forward surge of the Western world, roughly 1500-1950, corresponded with the dominance at sea of the kind of ship she was. And this was not altogether by coincidence. The broadsidefought big-gun battleship passed through many technological changes until her last great encounter at Surigao Strait in 1944, but her essential capabilities-to keep the sea, and to sink other ships by gunfirewere present in this very first battleship. And the national strategy of England, the ruling sea power through most of these four and a half centuries, was to use such ships to open up world trade and, toward the end of the period, to found two overseas empires that proved equally transient-one American and one African SEA HISTORY, WINTER 1982
and Asiatic. The seeds of independence carried abroad with the English language had something to do with the relatively short endurance of the British Empire in what is now the United States, and in the case of the Indian subcontinent the very concept of nationhood was exported along with English railways and English law and government. The world was opened, in this period, by The first-rate 100-gun HMS Victory, most famous of those "far-distant storm-beaten ships;' was Nelson's flagship at Trafalgar in 1805.
ships, and in the conflict of national aspirations, commercial rivalries and religious and latterly ideological interests, the battleship was the arbiter of armed conflict. "Those far-distant, storm-beaten ships, upon which the Grand Army never looked, stood between it and the dominion of the world." That was how Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, USN, reviewed the essential lesson of the wars of Napoleon Bonaparte. Essentially battleships-two score of them in World War I, a scanty 15 in the Royal Navy at the outbreak of World War II in 1939, and a like number in the US Navy-carried the opportunities of Western society safe through these and other wars. We have quite a message delivered us from the Mary Rose, that archaic looking thing, that very Ark, which stands like a trumpeter at the doorway to modern history. As she comes up from the seabed, back into the sunlight she last saw when Henry VIII still stamped about this earth, let us listen with respect to all she has to tell ITT.
~
3