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In the 1750s, Henry VIII built a new fort and

Feb. 8, 2017 by Kenneth Newton

In the 1750s, Henry VIII built a new fort and built up a fleet of ships across southern France. The ship Mary Rose is buried under silt beneath a huge salt stream, but its remains are still visible beneath the surface. (Courtesy of Mary Rose Museum, London.)

"It's a very important piece of what made Mary Rose so significant in the United Kingdom," says Robert E. Hagen, who served as an archaeologist for the British Navy during the First World War and is an author of the forthcoming collection of The Mary Rose. "In 1795, a French commander named Le Pétroponte, a naval officer at the time, suggested the idea for a new fortress of the Elizabethan fleet, which was about 200 feet in height. They built it with a heavy cannon, made with iron, and then built an iron-clad structure about a hundred feet high and covered it with iron to make it more resistant to water."

The Mary Rose and its crew built it in less than three minutes. They used a piece of wood that they had cut into a large log to make it a more stable, reinforced vessel. That means that they could have built it on top of the Solent, or just underneath it. The only problem is that the iron clad structure is too heavy, so it can't move.

The structure is also too large, so it has to be hauled in a canoe. The Mary Rose was named after Henry VIII, and it's likely that he used the name to describe the ship.

"He was the greatest naval commander in Europe," says Christopher E. D'Alberts. "He was the first captain to use it as a naval anchor."

But the Mary Rose was more than just an anchor. She was the last ship under Henry VIII to have been commissioned. In 1804, the Queen commissioned her to carry supplies into the Canary Islands, and the ship's commander, Henry IV, wanted a new vessel for her. "There were more of the same items than at the time of our initial visit," says D'Alberts, who was at the time working on a piece of wood for a new colony in the Caribbean.