As the dive enters its last week, an interesting find was recovered in one of the trenches cut by the remotely operated vehicle. This was a deck plank removed from the ship in 1981 and buried offsite. It is particularly interesting as it is one of the planks directly under the spare pump for the ship. Made of 25mm thick elm, this 6m long plank may eventually be placed back inside the ship.
The wonderful weather has taken its toll with all the computers crashing out with heatstroke! The video survey of the site has been completed, including a "fly through tour of the hull hole." Memories of 1982 flooded back when a commemorative mug - issued for the raising - was discovered, probably dropped overboard just after the lifting of the hull.
Of the thousands of articles preserved, we now have some 270 registered finds and are engaged in the process of recording and photographing these. Many of these are small items such as lace ends or aiglets, buckles, silver coins, shoe fragments and elements from barrels, and we believe around 200 will be Tudor.
The last part of the operation is concentrating on cleaning up the site and ensuring that it is left in the best possible condition for the survey by HMS Gleaner in September this year.
Terschelling will complete the month's operation next Monday and we shall be posting our final despatch on the website on that day.
The 30 day dive programme on board Terschelling draws to a close today (Monday 18th August).
First mention must be made of our generous sponsors. The programme has been a joint operation with the Ministry of Defence contracting The Mary Rose Trust with sponsorship from Sonardyne for the majority of the acoustic position system; Sony for their great help with a fast rib to enable multi trips ashore and their considerable efforts to link the Mary Rose Museum via a Live Dive facility; SeaBoston who have given the Terschelling at base rate; computers from Oxford Maritime Trust and Andrews Survey for magnetometers, sidescan and multibeam surveys of the site.
Our brief for the dive programme was to clear known items of secondary deposition. This included hardwear left from excavation, spoil from excavation and objects purposely left buried.
We have achieved most targets, but some particular items have not been found e.g gun carriage bed and waist rail and we did not achieve 100% sieving of all spoil.
However, we did excavate 4 substantial trenches through spoil and can now quantify what may be contained therein. The spoil heaps which were once defined ridges covering 3-4 metres across, have now "spread" so the area which they cover is a band of 8 metres in width. Estimated amount of new modern sediments over the area of spoil heaps alone is c. 350 cubic metres. Our trenches through the spoil currently account for 6.6%.
Within this 6.6% we have recovered over 310 objects, with at least 200 being Tudor, mostly broken fragments of objects some of which can be identified. Of these 20 are substantially complete finds - a comb, silver coin, sundial, gold coin, kidney dagger, mail links, pins, aiglets, buckles, arrow fragments and wooden barrel tap.
Diving Statistics
We have currently undertaken almost 100 man dives, with 20 being two persons working, 100 dives up to 2.5 hours, most are 80-120 minutes. This depends on the location and tidal state. In addition, Monica (the crawling vehicle) has been working for about a quarter of that time, with productivity often outstripping the capability of processing the derived material.
Bow Timbers
The modern debris consisting of armoured power cable, eroded to hundreds of fine points, like razor wire (45-60 years old), this looks dumped and is within the 450 mm of new silt since 1998. This and the old (19th Century) and new material within the newly deposited silt suggests dumping or dredging nearby. There is far less life on the seabed, literally this is smothered like a sandstorm by modern silts. The creeper is a fisherman’s device for snagging lost posts and we have a string of pots going through the hull hole. This creeper actually snagged around our sinker which marked the northwest edge of the Mary Rose, right above our bow timbers. Clearing this debris dislodged the sandbags which covered several timber ends noted after the sinking (these were covered in sandbags.) We decided to excavate a small trench to see the extent of the timber, a substantial timber with several scarf joints has a width of 750mm and continues for 5m and is still continuing northwards. This is close to the west edge of where the hull was and we feel that it is a major element of the stem. Beneath and to the west of this are two 20mm wide elements which look like frames. The large timber is beginning to slope upwards (towards the trench) and over the 5 m length changes in depth by 410mm, the deeper end being close to where the Mary Rose "bow cut" was. As we began to find elements which appear to be associated (i.e the frame) we stopped enlarging the trench and concentrated on recording (measurements and video.) We cannot estimate the complexity of what may be associated or even the extent. If this is to the west (where we always had less of the ship) what MAY lie to the east? This eastwards extension is exactly what is most likely to be affected by the dredged channel.
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