A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks (24 page)

One of the canisters contained peppercorns, used as a treatment for fever and other ailments and found elsewhere in the ship where
they had probably been present as a spice; another artefact was a wooden pepper-grinder, the earliest known, discovered in the chest of an officer and still smelling of pepper when it was excavated. These finds provide a fascinating link with the earliest arrival in Europe of pepper from the Malabar Coast of India during the Graeco-Roman period, when it was shipped to the Red Sea ports of Egypt and taken overland to the Nile. Alexandria continued to be the main conduit for pepper import until the late fifteenth century, with Genoa and Venice controlling much of the trade, but Vasco da Gama's discovery of the sea route around the Cape of Good Hope opened up the spice trade to direct European involvement for the first time on a large scale. It was still more than half a century until the first voyage of the English East India Company to India in 1601, but by the mid-sixteenth century Portuguese merchants were already shipping several tons annually to Europe and that would probably have been the origin of the
Mary Rose
pepper.

The reign of Henry VIII saw important advances in the organisation of medical practice in England, with the foundation of the College of Physicians in 1518 and the merging of the Guild of Surgeons and the Company of Barbers to form the Company of Barber-Surgeons in 1540. Much of the impetus came from Henry VIII himself, through the eminent physicians in his court – including Thomas Linacre, one of the first Englishmen known to have studied Greek in Italy, and translator into Latin of the works of Galen, the ancient Greek physician who was the basis for much medical thinking at the time. The appointment of naval surgeons became the responsibility of the Barber-Surgeon's Company and its successor, the Royal College of Surgeons, but the first mention of a medical service at sea is from the period when Henry's navy was coming into being – a document of 1512–13 lists the three ranks as chief surgeon, ‘other sirgions being most expert', and junior surgeons. Fascinatingly, the status of the
Mary Rose
surgeon may be revealed by the discovery of a silk velvet cap or ‘coif' next to the chest, very similar to those worn by senior surgeons in a painting by Holbein showing Henry VIII presenting the Barber-Surgeon's Company to their new master at its foundation in 1540.

Much of the debate among physicians at the time was philosophical rather than scientific, and concepts such as the body being made up of four ‘humours' – advocated by Hippocrates in the fourth century
BC
and by Galen – continued to shape practice, with blood-letting being
one way of keeping the ‘balance'. Some interventions might seem crude by modern standards, including the use of the syringe to irrigate the urethra, and trepanning. However, Tudor surgeons could be capable technicians, able to deal with head injuries, amputations, fractures, dislocations and burns, as described in the first textbook of naval surgery by William Clowes in 1588. The devastating effects of naval gunfire on the human body, through direct hits and splinter wounds, were only just becoming familiar, but the barber-surgeon on the
Mary Rose
was well prepared and his instruments would have been up to the task 260 years later on HMS
Victory
at the Battle of Trafalgar.

On the
Mary Rose
a bigger and more intractable killer may have been at large: two weeks after her sinking, John Dudley, Lord Admiral, wrote to Henry about an outbreak of dysentery which had caused great sickness in the fleet owing to the ‘great hete and the corruption of the victuall' in an unusually hot summer – something which may have been occupying the barber-surgeon and his assistants in the hold of the ship, where many skeletons were found of men who may have been ill or convalescing.

Plato and Aristotle both advocated the use of music therapeutically; Galen recommended music for those bitten by vipers, and Paracelsus, one of the most influential physicians of the second half of the sixteenth century, believed that the flute could cure epilepsy. The discovery next to the barber-surgeon's cabin of a douçaine, an early form of oboe, may suggest that it was part of his equipment too, with references in the sixteenth century to barber-surgeons having musical instruments that were played for their tranquilising effect. Perhaps more likely is that it was associated with the other musical instruments found in the wreck, including two fiddles and bows, three pipes, and a ‘tabor' drum, a type of snare drum – the pipe being played with one hand while the other beat a rhythm on the drum – and equipped a professional band who may have been on board to provide entertainment. The type of music being played could have ranged from dance songs and well-known ballads, accompanied by singing by members of the troupe and the crew, to more refined melodies as a backdrop to dining for the officers and other gentlemen on board.

These instruments are extremely rare survivals – the douçaine is only otherwise known from written descriptions, only one other sixteenth century fiddle survives, and the tabor drum and pipe combination has
only ever been seen before in pictures. The douçaine was a double-reed instrument almost a metre long that may have originated in the wind instruments of the east Mediterranean such as the aulos of ancient Greece and been brought to northern Europe during the Crusades; it is similar to the better-known shawm but had a cylindrical rather than a conical bore and produced a quieter sound, more like a clarinet. One of the pipes, made of boxwood, was marked with the symbol of the Bassano family, Venetian musicians and instrument makers probably of Sephardic Jewish origin who played for the Doge and were described in a letter to Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's Chancellor, from his agent in Venice, as ‘all excellent and esteemed above all other in this city in their virtue' and that it would be ‘no small honour to His Majesty to have music comparable with any other prince or perchance better and more variable'. In 1538, one of them, Anthony Bassano, was appointed as ‘maker of divers instruments of music' to Henry VIII's court, and his three brothers joined him in London in 1540. They are also known to have made shawms, and it is possible that the douçaine from the wreck was their work as well.

Henry VIII's greatest effect on the history of English music came from the break with the Church in Rome, as the dissolution of the monasteries ended centuries of musical tradition but also provided opportunities for composers to write innovative music for the new services – part of the creative awakening of the Reformation. At the time of the
Mary Rose
the best-known English composer was Thomas Tallis, who had begun as a chorister in a Benedictine Priory but from 1542 was a ‘Gentleman of the Chapel Royal' at Hampton Court Palace, shaping his music according to the Catholic or Protestant requirements of the succession of monarchs he served. Two of Tallis's best-known works were composed only the year before the sinking of the
Mary Rose
, the five-part
Litany
and the
Gaude gloriosa Dei Mater
. The
Litany
was a setting of Archbishop Cranmer's
Exhortation and Litany
, the first official service in English rather than Latin and first performed at St Paul's Cathedral on 23 May 1544. The
Gaude gloriosa
was a votive antiphon for the Virgin Mary, an arrangement of harmonies, counterpoints and groupings of solo voices and full choir, and remains one of the most celebrated works of English music to this day.

Both of these works have a direct bearing on the
Mary Rose
, as they can be seen as part of a ‘girding for war' in response to Henry's imminent campaign against France – the
Litany
was designed for public
processions in which divine help was invoked in the cause of war, with the English vernacular making it more accessible and understood. A fragment of the
Gaude gloriosa
was discovered in 1978 in Corpus Christi College, Oxford, set to words recently identified as a psalm translated from Latin by Henry's last wife, Katherine Parr, whose book of psalms that allowed this identification – the anonymous
Psalms or Prayers
of 1544 – included a prayer for the king and ‘for men to saie entryng into battaile'.

The
Litany
and the
Gaude gloriosa
provide one form of musical backdrop to the
Mary Rose
; another is the type of folk song likely to have been performed on the ship, something which draws the story again to Henry VIII himself. As a young man Henry was said to have exercised himself daily in ‘playing at the recorders, flute, virginals, in setting songs, and making of ballads'. A collection of his compositions from about 1518 survives in the
Henry VIII Manuscript
in the British Library, comprising twenty songs and fourteen instrumental pieces ascribed to ‘The Kynge H'. The best known of these, ‘Pastyme with good companye', thought to have been written for Katherine of Aragon, became a popular song not only in court but across the country, with its appealing message: ‘Pastime with good company/I love and shall until I die … so God be pleased thus live will I.' It is poignant to think that when Henry came on board the
Mary Rose
, which he certainly did in 1522 and may well have done in her final days, he could have heard this and other compositions of his own being played on the very instruments that were found in the wreck.

The aims of the
Mary Rose
Committee in 1967 were to ‘find, excavate and preserve for all time such remains of the ship
Mary Rose
as may be of historic or archaeological interest'. At the time, there was no protective legislation in the UK for historic wrecks; the
Mary Rose
was one of the first to be designated when the Protection of Wrecks Act was passed in 1973. The project since then has gripped the popular imagination, from the drama of the 1982 recovery – watched by over 60 million people worldwide – to the opening of the new museum, with the ship now having been seen by more than 10 million visitors. It has shaped perceptions not only of the Tudor period but also of the power of archaeology to reveal individuals from the past and their day-to-day lives. To walk into the museum is as if Holbein had brought his eye to bear on the totality of life at the time, or the Cowdray engraving
had become a living diorama. All of this has been possible through the exactitude of archaeological recording, allowing an experience of history that cannot be had from isolated artefacts by themselves – it is their place in the ship, and thereby in the wider historical context, that allows the story of the
Mary Rose
to be told so compellingly, brought to life brilliantly by the divers, archaeologists and historians who have made this one of the greatest of all wreck projects.

The first time I saw the Mullion Pin Wreck off Cornwall near the south-western tip of England I thought I was seeing the seabed sparkling with gold. When I had heard about the wreck several years before I had been told that it was hardly worth a dive – that it was buried under shingle after treasure-hunters had used explosives to try to free a cannon that was concreted to the seabed and had brought down tons of rock from the adjacent cliff onto the site. In the early summer of 2018 I decided to look for myself, and snorkel the same route that the diver Peter McBride had taken when he discovered the wreck in 1969. After weeks of storms the sea had settled, with only a two-foot swell and the underwater visibility good enough to see the inshore rocks from the cliff path above. I kitted up and set off from the cove of Polurrian on the west side of the Lizard Peninsula, keeping close under the cliffs and passing the feared reef of Meres Ledges. On the way I swam over the wreckage of the
Boyne
, a barque carrying sugar from Sumatra that struck the ledges in a storm in 1863 and went down with most of her crew. The ship that I was seeking had fared little better, with at least twenty-five of those on board perishing as she was blown into the cliffs. The legacy of death is an ever-present aspect of diving on shipwrecks, as if the emotion of those final moments of people's lives is imprinted on the seabed, and as I rounded the reef and entered the inlet of Pol Glas it was with a sense of trepidation as well as excitement.

I knew that the wreck lay somewhere ahead of me, but in the shadow of the cliffs the seabed lay just beyond visibility. It was a forbidding place, like the entrance to a giant underwater cavern, and I let the swell slowly take me forward. A cascade of rock loomed into view and I realised that I was looking at the cliff-fall caused by the explosives several decades before. Beyond that the seabed was shallower, an area of sand with flat shelves of bedrock on either side. I realised that the
shingle trapped in the inlet by the rockfall had been driven by the winter storms into the shore, exposing the wreck below. I saw a shape in the sand that looked wrong for a rock, took a deep breath and dived down, blowing on my nose to equalise the pressure in my ears. Even before reaching it I could see from the rusty orange colour that it was the remains of a cannon, worn to a nearly unrecognisable shape by the shingle as it swept up and down the gully during storms.

I put my hand on the cannon, saw the rust stain on my palm and then looked ahead. There were no other artefacts visible in the sand, but in the gloom at the edge of my vision I could see rocks, and to the left, the entrance to a side gully. I finned forward, angling towards the surface to use my remaining breath to see as much as I could. As I passed over the rocks I saw the unmistakeable shapes of more cannon, and then a shimmer that looked like sand, but I realised must be something else – a golden sparkle in the concretion surrounding the cannons. I surfaced, took a few breaths and quickly dived down again, coming to rest on the seabed and putting my hand on what I had seen. It was what had given the wreck its nickname – thousands of shiny brass clothing pins, part of an extraordinarily rich cargo being taken from Amsterdam to Spain and Italy in the autumn of 1667. I knew now for certain that I had found the Mullion Pin Wreck – the
Santo Cristo di Castello
– and that I had to return with full scuba gear.

After climbing back up the cliff path to my vehicle and stowing my equipment I immediately called Mark Milburn, my friend and diving companion on many wrecks. Several years earlier we had founded Cornwall Maritime Archaeology, a research and exploration group devoted to recording the wrecks off Cornwall's south coast, and we had worked under the aegis of Historic England – the public body that protects historic sites – on several wrecks off the Lizard Peninsula. The Pin Wreck was suddenly a priority because it was not protected by law – reports of its burial under shingle had meant that there seemed little need – but what I had seen suggested that there might be exposed artefacts that could be at risk of being looted by treasure-hunters. Mark arranged to bring an inflatable boat to Mullion harbour, where we could launch and be at the site within twenty minutes. Joining us several days later would be my daughter Molly, who had dived with me on shipwrecks in the Great Lakes of Canada but for whom this would be her first wreck dive in British waters.

We arrived at the site and anchored close to the entrance of the inlet. On the way we had followed the likely route of the ship as it was blown to destruction, from a position of relative safety in the lee of Mullion Island half a mile across the sea to Pol Glas. While Mark secured the boat, Molly and I kitted up and rolled over the side. We had 12-litre cylinders, enough for an hour underwater at the ten-metre depth of the wreck, and I was determined to use every minute to record what we could. We had established from previous plans of the site that the deposit of artefacts in the side-gully had never been exposed or excavated before. The visibility had improved, and as we snorkelled over to the gully we could see the wreck laid out below us.

We dropped down on the place where I had first seen the pins and began to explore the surrounding seabed. Molly carefully wafted away the sand and exposed a beautiful candlestick, of a shape that we later identified as fifteenth century – meaning that within a few minutes we had found one of the oldest artefacts ever to be recorded from a wreck off Cornwall. Mark joined us and beckoned me over to see what he had found. It was a huge lead ingot, weighing 100 kilograms or more, and beyond it were two more cannons. He pointed out artefacts that he had spotted in the concretion – more candlesticks, pins, fragments of copper ingots and other unidentifiable items. By the end of the dive we had taken hundreds of photographs, sketched a preliminary plan of the gully and selected several of the more vulnerable artefacts for recovery, much of it material that had been moved around over the years as the groundswell from storm waves swept over the site.

We reported the finds we had recovered to the Receiver of Wreck – the office of medieval origin to which all wreck finds made in British waters must be declared – and then began conserving, recording and studying them. Many weeks of diving followed, from boat and from shore, and I set out to find as much documentary evidence for the wreck as I could. We already knew that the ship was exceptionally interesting, opening a fascinating window on trade and seafaring in the seventeenth century, but what I was to discover could never have been anticipated – that among her cargo manifest were paintings that were among the greatest lost works of art from the Dutch ‘Golden Age', by one of the greatest painters who ever lived.

Quod navem St Christo de Castello, 17 March 1668

William Paynter of Sitney in the County of Cornwall gent maketh oath, that in the month of October 1667 and most particularly on or about the ffifth day of the said month A certain ship named the S
^t
Christo de Castello was splitt in pieces and cast away neere Mullion to the westward of the Lizard and many of her Company were lost, but one Lorenzo Viviano who was Comander or Maister of the said shippe and some others who did belong to her came ashoare, and indeavoured to save what they could to carry away with them or to dispose of the same but they stayed there not long, the said Comander going from there within two or three days and most of the Company about a week after and none of them stayed above a month at most, and after they had dissposed of some Cynamon Cloves and Corall which was saved whilest they stayed there, they forsoake and left all the rest. And since their departure a quantity of iron and of Leade and some guns, cables and an anchor have been recovered out of the Sea, and some Cynamon, some Russia hides and some pieces of the shippe as masts and beams and other ffurniture thereunto belonging, have been also saved and have ever since being about the space of (—) months been in the hands of Ffrancys Godolphin Esq
^e
or some parties by him intrusted to preserve the same, and some also is in the hands of some other persons who have not yet delivered it into the custody of the said Viceadmirall, and the charge of keeping the same for warehouse roome and looking to it doth daily increase, and the Cynamon and hides are grown worse and deteriorated by their long lying undisposed of …

William Paynter was a wealthy landowner in western Cornwall, the father of William, Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford and later Vice-Chancellor of the University; Francis Godolphin was Vice-Admiral of South Cornwall, a great-nephew of Sir William Godolphin, Governor and so-called ‘pirate king' of the Scilly Isles, and brother of William, ambassador to Madrid and a ‘very pretty and able person', according to the diarist Samuel Pepys. William Paynter acted as agent to the Crown in the battle against Cornish ‘wreckers', local people who were often the first on the scene of a wreck and would strip the site of anything they could. The ship in question, ‘very richly laden … with her Cargoe reputed to be worth 100,000 pounds' – over £16 million
in today's money – had been the subject of a petition sent in August 1666 by her captain Giovanni Lorenzo Viviano to King Charles II of England, asking for safe passage through the Channel at a time when England was at war with Holland, on the grounds that despite coming from Amsterdam she was Genoese, not Dutch:

To the King's Most Excellent Ma
^tie
 … Most Humbly Sheweth … That yo
^e
Pet
^e
did cause to be built at Amsterdam the said Ship S
^t
Christo de Castello upon the Account of himself, and other Genoueses resident in the State of Genoa, and paid for her with their owne moneys … That having fitted the said Ship with 48 Gunnes and 120 Seamen, yo
^e
Pet
^e
is by Order from the said Genoueses to Lade severall Comodityes at Amsterdam aforesaid, & thence to proceed on a Tradeing Voyage for Lisbon, Cadiz, and other Ports on the Coast of Spaine, and from thence to Saile for Legorne & Genoa … That yo
^e
Ma
^tie
would be graciously Pleased, to graunt Your Royal Pass Port for the said Ship and her Ladeing, to Pas from Amsterdam aforesaid, to the several Places above – mentioned, without any Molestation.

The Anglo-Dutch war had ended by the time that the ship set sail from Amsterdam in the autumn of 1667, and it was the weather, not enemy action, that was to be her undoing – Viviano had set off late in the sailing season when the south-westerlies off the Atlantic were a greater risk, and the ship was blown back against the Lizard Peninsula as it attempted to round the point. The identification of this ship with the Mullion Pin Wreck has given a rich archaeological dimension to the story, with hundreds of artefacts having been discovered in the 1970s and again during ongoing investigations under my direction. Archival research in London, Amsterdam, Spain and Genoa has added greatly to the picture, showing how the cargo touched on almost every part of the world known at the time, and including an extraordinary revelation about the reason for Captain Viviano's delay in Amsterdam in 1667 – that he was waiting for the completion of two works of art for his patron in Genoa by none other than Rembrandt van Rijn, works that make the
Santo Cristo di Castello
one of the most fascinating wrecks of the Dutch Golden Age.

The wreck at Pol Glas was first reported in 1969 by Peter McBride, a Royal Navy officer based at nearby RNAS Culdrose who went for a snorkel below the cliffs near Mullion and saw cannon sticking out of the shingle. Over the next few years he and a small team excavated part of the wreck, using explosives to free chunks of concretion and get at the artefacts. The most likely identity of the ship had been suggested in their initial research. The
Calendar of State Papers
for King Charles II records that on 5 October 1667 ‘The
Santo Cristo di Castello
, a new ship built at Amsterdam, and laden with cloth and spices … has been cast away near the Lizard, and 25 men and women drowned; the captain and crew got ashore in their boat,' complementing the evidence of the passport application quoted above and the deposition of William Paynter. Even so, I had wanted to find something at the wreck that would further secure its identity. It happened only a few weeks into our initial excavation, when I discovered a brass merchant's weight of a type made in Amsterdam and stamped by the regulating authority with three dates – 1662, 1663 and 1665. That last date, 1665, was the latest that I would expect to find on a ship that had been built and equipped in 1665–6 and was due to depart on its maiden voyage that year, meaning that I now had added certainty that the wreck was the
Santo Cristo di Castello
.

The fifteen iron guns at the site represent just under one third of the known armament of the ship and provide a unique picture of the guns on a Dutch-built merchantman of this period – at a time when merchant crews needed to be able to defend themselves from being taken as prizes by warring nations as well as against the Barbary pirates of North Africa. We knew that the ship had also been carrying brass ‘swivel guns' to repel boarders, and it was exciting to find the breech-chamber from one of these weapons. Hundreds of lead musket shot of various calibres included ‘wired shot', pairs of balls joined by brass wire designed to expand on firing to inflict maximum damage. The amount of small-arms ammunition showed how real the threat was of close-quarters action at sea for a merchantman of this period. Some of the musket balls had been flattened, which we suspected had been caused by impact after firing rather than during the wrecking – something that I confirmed experimentally by shooting lead balls from an eighteenth-century musket against a hard surface, producing identical effects and showing that the flattened balls had been expended ammunition collected from a shooting range or battlefield and destined for recasting.