When the British military historian Alexander McKee began searching for shipwrecks near the Isle of Wight in 1965, there was one in particular he hoped to find: the Mary Rose. The Tudor-era ship had evaded search parties for centuries, and would probably have continued to do so were it not for the discovery of a 1841 chart pinpointing its final resting place. But finding the Mary Rose was only half the work. Once she had been located, another, even more daunting challenge presented itself to McKee and his team: How to bring her back to the surface?

The Mary Rose holds a special place in English naval history. Constructed in 1510 on the orders of then 19-year-old King Henry VIII, and named after the Virgin Mary and the Tudor family’s thorny sigil, it was among the first warships the English crown had ever commissioned. Predating the establishment of the Royal Navy by several decades, she has come to occupy such a central place in British culture and collective memory that McKee was awarded a knighthood for finding her.

A canon from the Mary Rose, one of many pieces of weaponry and artillery recovered. Photo: Carl Court/AFP via Getty Images.

After surviving no less than three decades of battle-tested service, the Mary Rose met her demise on July 19, 1545. Setting sail to confront a French fleet off the coast of Portsmouth, the very place where shipwrights built her, she appears to have fallen not to enemy fire, but a stray gust of wind that tipped her on her side in the midst of turning. According to Francois van der Delft, an ambassador to Henry VIII present at the ensuing battle, the ship took all but a few dozen of her 500-man crew down with her. “Misfortune and carelessness” is how he described her last moments in a secret report to Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.

The Mary Rose was pulled up from the seabed using a crane and a 500 ton cradle after 437 under water. Photo: Bettmann via Getty Images.

According to the same report, the English planned on locating the Mary Rose to retrieve her guns. If such a rescue attempt ever took place, it did not succeed.

When McKee’s team found the ship in 1971, she was almost completely intact. Soft silt and oxygen-free waters had preserved not just the ship itself, but also many of her Tudor-era contents. Divers returned to the surface with dinner plates carrying King Henry’s initials, a pair of leather falconry gloves, and a wide array of human bones whose DNA suggests that the crew included sailors from places as distant as the Iberian Peninsula and the North African coast—a revelation that challenged beliefs about the racial and cultural composition of the navy during its earliest years.

The wreck of the Mary Rose, hoisted out of the water, in its cradle. Photo: Bettmann via Getty Images.

Most impressive of all was the assortment of medieval weaponry found with the shipwreck. According to the Mary Rose Trust, the non-profit that manages the ship’s preservation, the wreckage contained 91 guns, 172 longbows, and 2,000 arrows, not to mention numerous swords, daggers, and pikes. In all, more than 8,300 individual weapons have been recovered—a feat that earned the Trust a Guinness World Record in 2022.

Many of these items are on display at the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth, along with the ship itself. A decade after its initial discovery in the early 1970s, the salvageable parts of the wreck were hoisted to the surface using a custom-built crane. The remains were then placed on a barge and transported back to the historic dockyard where they originally came from.

The wreck of the Mary Rose, sunk during the Battle of the Solent, on display in Portsmouth. Photo by Olivia Harris via Getty Images.

The Hunt explores art and ancient relics that are—alas!—lost to time. From the Ark of the Covenant to Cleopatra’s tomb, these legendary treasures have long captured the imaginations of historians and archaeologists, even if they remain buried under layers of sand, stone, and history.