It's a documentary about the restoration of Mary Rose, a famous war ship of English king Henri VIII who sank in 1545, and remained on the seabed until 1982.
The journalist of BBC News Channel Robert Hall travelled to Sweden to speak to Fred Hocker, Director of Research at Vasa Museum, about the procedures used to treat and protect historic ships as the Vasa in 1961.So the Vasa was filmed here. (Vasa is one of the oldest and best-preserved ships salvaged in the world, owing to the cool temperatures and low salinity of the Baltic Sea).
Transcription of this video extract :
- The Mary Rose and Vasa projects have been linked for a long time.
The two big
shipwreck recovery projects seen in history maritime archeology, the two big
successful ones. And… because Mary Rose
came along almost exactly a generation after Vasa in terms of the salvage and
its conservation. The Mary Rose
project could benefit from the lessons learnt by doing the Vasa project.
They also
took a different approach to the excavation phase. Vasa was four years of preparations and salvage followed by five
months of excavation.
Mary Rose was very much the opposite ; it was more than
a decade of excavation followed by the salvage. But it also means that when we
encounter problems here with Vasa,
what we discovered in that process can be applied to Mary Rose in advance, they don’t have to suffer the consequences of
the mistakes that we made. On Mary Rose,
it will be easier to mitigate the consequences of the conservation process than
there were with Vasa because we… when
Vasa was conserved nobody knew with
the consequences were going to be. No one actually knew that the treatment
would work or how thing I would resolve. Now we know how the strict kind of treatment
works.
Mary Rose has been able to develop a much more
sophisticated version of that which would be much more effective. It has to get
rid of the water that was part to the conservation treatment and leave the
polyethylene glycol behind and unavoidably there will be some shrinkage of the
timbers. We’ve had about six percent shrinkage across the grain and on average
but it varies quite a lot. What Mary Rose
will probably see is on average much less shrinkage and I will suspect much
less variation in shrinkage much more even response to the treatment. They’ve
been able to tailor that treatment very carefully to the state of preservation
of the ship.
- So the
story doesn’t end either here or in Portsmouth.
- No there
is no end, that there are just [mot manquant] so long the way, and some of
[mots manquants], when the hot box comes down, people can actually see the
entire ship, they want for be a great moment be a great moment, but there will
always be new challenges. We’ve only been treating ships this way, waterlogged
wood for fifty years. And so we only know what the first fifty years have
consequences of long-term indications as the hours.
Another
fifty years… Other things who are going to happen that we can’t imagine now, as
you have to be prepared for that, we have to have people looking after the ship
constantly.
We have the
same tendence. In addition to that, eternal responsibility, there’s eternal
opportunity. There’s a chance to ask new questions all the time.
The things
that we want to know today about the XVIIth Century as we know the XVIth
Century in England
may not be the things that our children want to know, our grandchildren want to
know, as long as the ship is there and it’s properly looked after.
There’s
always that opportunity: ask new questions, learn new things about that period.
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