British museum to display relics of age-old ship

The relics from the Mary Rose, the flagship of England’s navy when it sank in 1545 as a heartbroken King Henry VIII watched from the shore, have finally been reunited with the famous wreck in a new museum offering a view of life in Tudor times.
Skeletons, longbows, tankards, gold coins and even nit combs are going on display alongside the remains of the pride of Henry’s fleet.
Thousands of the 19,000 artifacts excavated from beneath the seabed can be seen in the new £ 27 million ($ 41 million) Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth on England’s south coast, which opens today.
Historians have dubbed the treasure trove the “English Pompeii“: A fragment of the past perfectly frozen in time.
“The objects are beautifully preserved because they were buried under the mud, and it’s that silt that actually preserved the objects,” said archaeologist Christopher Dobbs, one of the original salvage team members.
Built in the very dockyard where the new museum sits, the wooden ship was launched in 1511.
The Mary Rose fought three wars with the French but mysteriously keeled over and sank off Portsmouth on July 19, 1545, while fighting off a French invasion fleet.
Around 500 men were killed, with no more than 35 surviving, as Henry looked on from the shore as it slipped below the waters of the Solent.
After a six-year search, the legendary ship was definitively identified in 1971.
Following years of painstaking work, the wreck was at last raised in 1982, in a spectacular operation watched live by millions on television.
Around a third of the wooden warship, which was almost completely buried under the sea bed, had survived, the exposed parts having eroded away.
Now thousands of articles removed from the decks are being exhibited alongside the wreck, which had previously been on show in a more modest museum in Portsmouth since 1983.
Wooden gun carriages, cooking pots, scalpels, leather book covers, syringes, fiddles, whistles, weapons, navigation devices and furniture are among the items on display. The new museum, part of a £ 35 million heritage project, is a three-tiered, ellipse-shaped building made of black-stained timber.
Visitors walk through the galleries encircling the ship’s carcass in the near-darkness that is essential to preserve the objects, but it also evokes the conditions the crew would have experienced below deck, with the sound of wind, waves and creaking wood.