The carrack Mary Rose was King Henry VIII’s flagship. After thirty three years of service, it sank in the Solent on July 19, 1545. Out of 500 sailors, 35 survived. The wreck was located in 1971 and the ship was raised from the ocean floor in 1982 in one of the most complex and expensive projects in the history of maritime archaeology.
After thirty years work to preserve the remains of the ship and to catalog the tremendous trove of artifacts found aboard, a new and permanent Mary Rose Museum opens to the public on Friday May 31 in Portsmouth Historic Dockyard.