Construction began on 29 January 1510 in Portsmouth, and the Mary Rose was launched in July 1511. She was one of the earliest purpose-built sailing warships in England, ordered into existence as the young Henry VIII rebuilt the small navy he had inherited from his father. The ship displaced around 500 tons and required something like 600 oaks - roughly 16 hectares of woodland - and her largest deck beams weighed close to three-quarters of a tonne. She was almost certainly named for Henry's sister Mary and for the Virgin Mary's symbol, the Rosa Mystica. Her sister ship, the Peter Pomegranate, took her name from Saint Peter and from Catherine of Aragon's heraldic badge. Together they formed the seed of what would become the Royal Navy.

Forensic archaeology has given the men of the Mary Rose back something the sea took away. The bones of 179 people were excavated from the wreck site, including 92 fairly complete skeletons. The crew were all male. Most were young - some as young as 11 to 13, and 81 per cent were under 30. Many were strong and well-fed, but their bones tell of grinding childhood labour and healed shipboard fractures. Oxygen-isotope analysis of teeth showed that the crew came from across England and from continental Europe; at least one man was of North African ancestry, and others probably had southern European origins. A group of six skeletons clustered around a two-tonne bronze culverin near the bow appear to have been a gun crew, men who died at their station. Among the archers, an unusual number had a shoulder-blade condition - os acromiale - known among modern elite athletes, caused by drawing a heavy bow from childhood. The only crewman whose name is securely recorded is Vice-Admiral George Carew, who went down with his command.

France had assembled a fleet of perhaps 200 vessels and 50,000 troops at Le Havre with the intent of landing on English soil. By early July 1545 the French were in the Solent. Henry VIII's 80 ships, the Mary Rose and the Henry Grace à Dieu at their head, had retreated into Portsmouth harbour. On 19 July the wind died and left the English becalmed; French galleys closed on them, threatening to overwhelm the smaller English oared boats. Then the wind picked up, the sails filled, and the Mary Rose with the Henry Grace à Dieu led the counter-attack. Something went wrong almost immediately. The ship heeled heavily to starboard. The lower gunports - meant to be closed in any seaway - were open for action, and water rushed in. Heavy guns broke free and slammed across the deck. The galley's massive brick oven collapsed and the copper cauldron flew. Men trying to climb to safety hit the anti-boarding netting overhead and could go no further. From a crew of at least 400, fewer than 35 got out alive. The exact cause of the sinking is still debated; what is not in doubt is the speed of it, or the chaos.

The wreck site was identified in 1971, and the salvage that followed became one of the most ambitious feats of maritime archaeology ever attempted - comparable in cost and complexity to the raising of the Swedish warship Vasa in 1961. Margaret Rule led the project for the Mary Rose Trust. Divers logged tens of thousands of hours surveying and excavating in the dark Solent silt; they recovered an extraordinary range of artefacts - longbows still strung with tension, daggers preserved as concretions, leather shoes, wooden combs, dice, a barber-surgeon's chest, musical instruments. On 11 October 1982 the surviving section of the hull was lifted from the seabed live on television, watched by Prince Charles and an estimated international audience of millions. The hull is now displayed at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard alongside roughly 19,000 recovered objects in the Mary Rose Museum.

What makes the Mary Rose extraordinary is not that she sank but what survived. Because the wreck quickly buried itself in anaerobic silt, organic material that would normally rot has come down to us intact. The ship carried 250 longbows; 172 have been recovered along with almost 4,000 arrows. There are pikes and bills, swords and daggers, the earliest dated example of a British basket-hilted sword. There are surgical instruments and shaving razors. There are pewter plates with their owners' marks, dominoes, a backgammon set, books, prayer beads. Among the finds: the skeleton of a young dog, probably the ship's ratter, named Hatch after the hatch where he was found. Forensic artists have reconstructed the faces of eight crew members from their skulls. DNA work has tied some of those men to living descendants.

The Mary Rose is the world's only surviving 16th-century warship raised from the seabed. She is a snapshot of a transitional moment in naval warfare, when wood and longbows met cannon and gunpowder. She is one of the earliest examples of a ship designed to fire a broadside, even before line-of-battle tactics had been worked out. She is also - and this is what visitors tend to remember longest - a graveyard. The Mary Rose Museum is built around the ship, with the silhouettes of crew members placed where their bones were found. Names are mostly missing, but faces are not. Origins are not. Trades are not. The bowyers and the gunners and the cook and the carpenter and the boy who carried powder - the museum returns them to the visitor as people, not as wreckage.