Mary Rose

[harlequin]

Just watched a fascinating documentary of the Mary Rose and the DNA samples taken from several of the remains found on the ship after it was brought up from the Solent....it now transpires that fighting along side the English on board ship that day were at least two crewmen whose origins were from North Africa and from Italy and Spain..  Tudor England was more diverse than we realise.

[fnkershner]

I went to this museum in Sept. It was fascinating! One of the highlights of my vacation. I spent 3/4 of a day just here. The admiral waited for me in the café. I also heard that they are about to raise another section of this ship soon. I can't believe that some guy spent every weekend for 5 yrs diving and looking for the wreck.

[Louie da fly]

I hope they find the forecastle! I've always had a problem with the forecastle in the commercial kit. It looks too much like one for a galleon. Looking at contemporary pics of similar ships, the forecastle is like a big slice of cake - triangular.

Steven

 

 

Edited March 18, 2019 by Louie da fly

[Stevinne]

I agree on the forecastle. I'm not a big fan of the Caldercraft kit. It doesn't look renaissancey enough for me. Billings had at one time said they were producing a kit, that I believe, looked more like the Geoff Hunt painting. Unfortunately, that project stalled. It's good news that they found more of the ship, I hadn't heard about it, so now I'll have to Google it. I'm currently reading Margaret Rule's book on excavating the MR and one of the questions I had is if anyone had looked beyond the immediate area for wreckage. Now I guess I have my answer.

[Thunder]

I wasn't surprised to find that there would be persons from many different backgrounds and nationalities on the ship, after all Matthew Cabot was Italian and we had been trading with Africa and Asia for hundreds of years. Evidence from the Vikings shows this.

 

I hated the program. It could of been excellent but as usual these days it was produced to fuel certain persons agendas with little regard to history. I hate any prejudism and positive is just as poor. The outcome of the whole program was obvious from the start when the program's second sentence was to the effect of that it would be great if the persons on board were black. His last sentence of the program was that he had spent his whole career trying to prove that  persons of African origin were living in Britain during Tudor times. Hardly makes him unbiased. The scientific evidence was not much better. I was doing the deck planking on cruiser by this time so may of missed it but most of us have African origin in our DNA it is usually very low but we did all descend from the same people. So when the first tests suggested British they dug deeper. Finding the descendants of Grenville was the same, the excited little dance when one of possible hundreds of people found was a woman.

 

It didn't say much for facial reconstruction techniques either did it. How wrong were they the first time!!

 

Can't say I am surprised with the program but then it wouldn't of been aired if the results were different. 

 

I suppose, taking the risk to speak about what I thought of it will make people think I am prejudiced my self but I am not. Just would like History to be researched properly and not be bent to the demand of modern thinking. But I suppose history has always been written that way. 

[BLACK VIKING]

Totally agree I was very disappointed with the way it was produced and I think they could have done a lot more with facial reconstruction instead of trying to find the relatives. And as for telling us that there where foreign people in Tudor Britain well what a surprise as Britain had been trading with the world for hundreds of years, you don't need to be a history professor to know that. 

Martyn

[harlequin]

5 hours ago, Thunder said:

I wasn't surprised to find that there would be persons from many different backgrounds and nationalities on the ship, after all Matthew Cabot was Italian and we had been trading with Africa and Asia for hundreds of years. Evidence from the Vikings shows this.

 

I hated the program. It could of been excellent but as usual these days it was produced to fuel certain persons agendas with little regard to history. I hate any prejudism and positive is just as poor. The outcome of the whole program was obvious from the start when the program's second sentence was to the effect of that it would be great if the persons on board were black. His last sentence of the program was that he had spent his whole career trying to prove that  persons of African origin were living in Britain during Tudor times. Hardly makes him unbiased. The scientific evidence was not much better. I was doing the deck planking on cruiser by this time so may of missed it but most of us have African origin in our DNA it is usually very low but we did all descend from the same people. So when the first tests suggested British they dug deeper. Finding the descendants of Grenville was the same, the excited little dance when one of possible hundreds of people found was a woman.

 

It didn't say much for facial reconstruction techniques either did it. How wrong were they the first time!!

 

Can't say I am surprised with the program but then it wouldn't of been aired if the results were different. 

 

I suppose, taking the risk to speak about what I thought of it will make people think I am prejudiced my self but I am not. Just would like History to be researched properly and not be bent to the demand of modern thinking. But I suppose history has always been written that way. 

tend to agree with a lot of what you say, and the personal agendas were blatantly obvious. As to whether it would have been shown if the results were different, not sure about that but again I probably agree with you on that also. You are not prejudiced in the way you think or what you say.  

[Stevinne]

In one of the books I'd read on the MR, it mentioned that it was thought a portion of the crew were from southern Europe - hence the "knaves I cannot rule" comment just prior to the sinking. Based on that, and the fact as Thunder mentioned above that England was already trading with Africa, Asia and the Middle East, it's not surprising the crew were genetically diverse. But who is going to watch a special, or feel compelled to visit a museum that advertises "New findings are surprisingly mundane!"

[Louie da fly]

9 hours ago, Stevinne said:

But who is going to watch a special, or feel compelled to visit a museum that advertises "New findings are surprisingly mundane!"

Couldn't agree more. I'm looking at doing a Bachelor of Arts degree in history, specialising in Byzantine studies. I realise that's not flavour of the month, but apart from the obligatory "history of the world to 1500 AD", most unis don't touch it  at all. But there are plenty of units available in flavour of the month subjects that are hardly history at all.

 

Back to the wreck itself, since they found what could well be the Tudor Rose "figurehead" back in 2014  

I think there's a good chance a fair bit of the forecastle could be nearby, and perhaps recoverable. 

 

Steven

Edited March 19, 2019 by Louie da fly

[mtaylor]

On 3/17/2019 at 2:11 PM, harlequin said:

Just watched a fascinating documentary of the Mary Rose and the DNA samples taken from several of the remains found on the ship after it was brought up from the Solent....it now transpires that fighting along side the English on board ship that day were at least two crewmen whose origins were from North Africa and from Italy and Spain..  Tudor England was more diverse than we realise.

 

 

Quite so and that diversity continued.   There's quite a bit of info in the book "The Billy Ruffian" on one of the Captain's spending time documenting his crew.  While some folks think this is amazing, it was pretty normal back then. 

[Thunder]

I think the diversity rarely spread further than the seafaring community. There is quite good coverage of this in Nelson's period and particularly at Trafalger. However, you only have to look at the influence behind designs of castles and who was contracted to build them to see that this was nothing new in the Tudor times. Remember that it also had not been long since we had developed Mediterranean practices for building ships , carvel, to allow us to have gun ports.

[Blue Ensign]

I am also surprised that the academics seemed  to think it a revelation find people of North African descent in England in Tudor times.

It is interesting to try and establish the origins of the crew, but I did find the presentation overdone and somewhat irritating.

Surely they were not unaware that there was sea trade between Europe and the  Mediterranean which would always lead to a degree of mingling certainly in coastal areas, and of course  seafarers of North Africa generally known as the Barbary pirates, were very active in European waters from the 16th century to feed the North African slave trade, something academics tend to shy away from  in present times.

 

B.E.

[Thunder]

Yes, been to a village location in Dorset that was abandoned after the Barbery pirates took the community into slavery and this was late 1700's. Nothing there to tell you about it. Wasn't the original reason for the USS Constitution being built to protect her ships from the same fate? 

[Canute]

The first 6 frigates were built to protect US trade in the Med. The rest of the fledgling Navy was primarily coastal craft. Jefferson had a heck of a time convincing Congress to spend the money. Old fears of standing military forces primarily.  But the desire for increasing trade finally over rode the nay sayers.

[Thunder]

Hi,

 

That's what I thought, the threat to trade was primarily the Barbary Pirates.

 

[Mark P]

Good Evening All;

 

I don't know the exact details without looking it up, but I remember that the American Navy fought several drawn-out campaigns against the Barbary pirates, as did the Royal Navy. But even if the corsairs were beaten, they always popped up again. If their ruler, the Bey or the Dey he was called, I think, agreed to make peace, he was never able to control his people for long, and they soon murdered him and replaced him with someone more willing to continue with the old ways. 

 

And yes, they did kidnap whole villages or small towns of people from the South coast of England, more frequently than most people nowadays would ever believe; and presumably from other countries also. Another lucrative line was ransoming the crews of merchant vessels captured in the Mediterranean. The Commonwealth Navy and Charles II's ships were frequently operating in the Med to protect shipping, and Parliament was often petitioned by merchants demanding better protection for their ships. 

 

Many Europeans were enslaved by the Barbary Pirates, and it is not pleasant to contemplate the fate of the women they caught. But as Blue Ensign points out above, there is never any mention of this when Western politicians, playing to a minority gallery, apologise for their country's involvement in the slave trade; or when some countries demand compensation for it. As if present generations are responsible for the sins of their country's citizens several centuries past. 

 

So slavery, undeniably an abomination to present generations, was very much a two-way street; something which deserves much greater publicity than it has ever received. I could say a lot more, but that would be getting off-topic, so I had better avoid it.

 

All the best,

 

Mark P

[Stevinne]

This discussion got me interested and I went back and watched "The Ghosts of the Mary Rose" documentary from a couple of years back about what could be learned from the skeletons of the crew members. There was mention of how a ship full of Spanish soldiers had gotten stuck in England about a year before the sinking, and there was some evidence that at least some of these guys were on the MR on the day she sank. Given Spain's history with the Moorish conquest, it wouldn't surprise me if some of those guys had DNA from all over the African continent. On a side note, it's amazing what DNA shows. My background is mostly Irish and German, but my brother had one of those ancestry DNA tests done, and it showed some traces from Spain and the Mid-East. I tell my kids, who have sailed with me before, that this is proof that my poor sailing abilities were inherited from shipwrecked survivors of the Armada. My wife, who actually is descended from one of the old Dutch explorers, rolls her eyes and says history is no excuse.