Academic Reading — Test 20

Reading passage

The Mary Rose was one of the foremost warships in the navy of King Henry VIII of England. Built in Portsmouth between 1509 and 1511, she served the crown for more than three decades before meeting a sudden and dramatic end. On 19 July 1545, while sailing out to engage a French invasion fleet in the Solent, the stretch of water separating the Isle of Wight from the English mainland, the ship heeled sharply, took on water through her open gunports and sank within minutes. The great majority of the several hundred men aboard drowned, and the vessel settled into the soft seabed where she would remain hidden for more than four centuries. The reasons for the sinking have never been established beyond doubt. Some accounts blame a sudden gust of wind that caught the ship as she turned; others point to the possibility that she was overloaded, or that her crew failed to close the lower gunports after firing. Whatever the immediate trigger, the consequence was that the Mary Rose came to rest on the floor of the Solent and was gradually buried by silt. This burial proved unexpectedly fortunate. The thick layer of mud sealed the timbers and many of the objects inside from oxygen and from the marine organisms that would otherwise have consumed them, preserving roughly half of the hull along with thousands of artefacts. Interest in recovering the ship revived in the twentieth century. In 1965 a search began, and by 1971 divers had positively identified the wreck. Over the following years an enormous underwater archaeological project took shape, eventually involving hundreds of divers who made tens of thousands of dives. Rather than simply hauling the timbers to the surface, the team excavated the site methodically, recording the precise position of every item before lifting it. The objects recovered offered an extraordinarily detailed picture of life aboard a Tudor warship: longbows and arrows, navigational instruments, cooking pots, musical instruments, leather shoes, and even the skeletal remains of crew members and the ship's dog. The hull itself was raised on 11 October 1982 in an operation watched by millions on television. A specially designed cradle was placed beneath the surviving structure, and the whole assembly was lifted clear of the water by a floating crane. The moment was not without alarm, as part of the lifting frame shifted during the operation, but the hull reached the surface intact. It was then transported to a dry dock in Portsmouth, close to where the ship had originally been built, to begin the long process of conservation. Conserving waterlogged timber that has spent centuries underwater is a slow and delicate undertaking. Wood that is allowed to dry out naturally will shrink, crack and ultimately collapse, because water has effectively replaced much of the original cellular material. To prevent this, the hull was first kept continuously sprayed with cool, fresh water for several years to wash away salts and to stop it drying. The spray was then replaced with a solution of polyethylene glycol, a wax-like chemical commonly abbreviated to PEG, which gradually soaked into the timbers and took the place of the water within the wood, giving the structure internal support. This spraying with PEG continued for many years before the hull was finally allowed to dry under carefully controlled conditions, a stage that itself took several more years to complete. Today the Mary Rose and a large selection of the recovered artefacts are displayed together in a purpose-built museum in Portsmouth. The project is widely regarded as a landmark in maritime archaeology, both for the scale of the recovery and for the conservation techniques it helped to refine. Beyond the technical achievement, the ship offers historians a rare and vivid window onto the daily lives of ordinary Tudor sailors, whose possessions and remains had lain undisturbed on the seabed for over four hundred years.