Timber & Tides
The Mary Rose, Henry VIII’s magnificent flagship, sank in the Solent in 1545, taking to the bottom nearly all of her crew of 500 men. In 1971, she was found and eventually raised once more, to be a testament to how pride goes before a fall. This is her story for teens, told through the eyes of Tom Harcourt, a Portsmouth boy who is dazzled by the building of the great carrack in 1509 and who spends his life on her decks, dying with her as a master gunner thirty-five years later in a freak accident of wind and injudicious overbuilding. The presence of Tom and his son Robert are predicated upon certain archaeological finds on board.
Packing 35 years into 157 pages means there isn’t much development of storyline, but there’s a whole lot of atmosphere of life at sea in the 16th century. A lot of repetition, too, some egregious enough to have made me cry, “Where was the editor!” But the naval battles, told from a gunner’s perspective, are among the best I’ve ever read, and for all the skipping brevity of Tom’s life story, I found myself genuinely saddened by his death. Or was it that of the great ship, built and rebuilt until her cargo of guns outweighed her capacity to carry them safely? Her loss was a tragedy and a lesson in the danger of hybris. If you or a teen you know loves the sea or all things Tudor, you’ll read this compulsively, as I did.
