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  The loss of the Mary Rose was not a unique disaster. Just two weeks earlier, the French flagship the Carraquon had also sunk. If the English Achilles’ heel was the changeable weather, the French weakness was their stomachs. Before leaving Le Havre, the French King, Francis I, and his men, together with the ladies of the court, had eaten well over the course of several hours aboard the flagship. Late in the afternoon, a fire broke out in the galley. It spread rapidly to the gun deck, where the heat caused the loaded guns to explode, bombarding the surrounding vessels. The Carraquon took several down with her. In an almost farcical turn of events, the ship that Admiral D’Annebault chose as a replacement, La Maitresse, also sank before she reached the Solent.

  As sinking ships were not altogether uncommon, there were men who specialised in recovering them. Despite the continuing threat of French invasion, Henry VIII lost no time in ordering that the Mary Rose be brought back up. The ship itself was valuable, but it was the loss of the guns that would be most costly. In 1552, it was estimated that the ordnance lost on the Mary Rose was worth £1,723; about £2 million today.6

  A group of Venetian salvage operators, led by Petre de Andreas and Symonde de Maryne, were deployed in August 1545. Their team comprised thirty-one Venetians, one of whom was a carpenter, with some sixty English sailors supporting them. They required plenty of equipment: fifty pulleys, sixty ballast baskets, 40 lb of tallow, or animal fat, ‘a great quantity of cordage of all sorts’ and two large ships, the Samson and the Jesus of Lubeck, which were to be spared from the King’s fighting force.* The plan was to heave the Mary Rose upright by pulling on her masts, then run cables from the two larger ships under the hull and pull them taut, thus raising the vessel from the sea bed to a level where she could then be pumped out and floated. Despite early optimism, the wreck proved beyond their expertise, and having broken the Mary Rose’s mast they called it a day. The fact that 35,904 pints of beer were consumed by the salvage team in less than a month – an expense duly billed to the crown – cannot have helped. While the Tudors avoided drinking water for fear of disease, and it was considered normal for a man to drink up to eight pints of weak beer a day, the team had each consumed more than fourteen pints a day while working on the project!7

  Nonetheless, the ordnance was too precious to be left on the ocean floor and, once the French threat had receded, a smaller salvage operation began. Lord Admiral John Dudley, Viscount Lisle, hired Peter Paulo Corsi to bring up as much of the Mary Rose’s valuable weaponry as possible. Corsi duly ‘caused certain instruments to be made for the only intent and purpose’ to retrieve ‘certain gear’ out of the Mary Rose.8 As well as equipment, the job required specialist divers. He assembled a team of eight men, including Jacques Francis, John Iko and George Blacke. Iko and Blacke may also have been of African origin, given their names and their diving skills.

  Corsi was now on the royal pay roll. In 1547, Edward Vaughan, Captain at Portsmouth, was reimbursed by the Treasurer for Marine Causes for £37 11s 5d he’d paid Corsi for the recovery of ‘certain anchors and ordnance out of the Mary Rose’. The register of the Privy Council records further payments made to Corsi: £20 via Sir John Williams on 17 May 1547 and £50 by ‘Mr Carew’ on 3 August 1549. This was not of course the George Carew who drowned in the Mary Rose, but Sir Wymond Carew, Treasurer of the First Fruits and Tenths. The money Carew paid to Corsi had been ‘imprest of the relief of spirituality’, that is, it came from a clerical tax revenue that had previously enriched the Pope, but was redirected into the royal coffers by Thomas Cromwell in 1534. The total cost of the salvage attempts over four years, from 1545 when the Mary Rose sank until 1549 when Carew made the final payment, amounted to nearly £560. About a fifth of that was paid to Corsi, who, with his team, had succeeded in taking ‘certain guns out of the ship drowned’.9

  The Mary Rose was not the only wreck Jacques Francis and Corsi’s team worked on during this period. On St Martin’s Day, 11 November 1546, the Sancta Maria and Sanctus Edwardus suffered a ‘great mischance’. She had set sail from Southampton bound for the Italian ports of Livorno, Messina and Venice laden with the typical exports of woollen clothing, kerseys (woollen cloth) and Cornish tin, plus cottons, leather and lead. Before she left Southampton Water, a fire broke out on board and the ship sank some two miles from shore.10

  The Sancta Maria and Sanctus Edwardus belonged to Francesco Bernardi of Venice, but she was carrying merchandise belonging to various prominent Italian merchants. One was Domenico Erizzo, who had been elected consul of the Venetians in London in 1533. The Florentine Bartholomew Fortini, who made a fortune supplying the King with saltpetre and brimstone for the royal arsenal, also had goods on board. Another, Niccolo de Marini, came from a large mercantile family with business interests in Southampton. He was born in West Hall, one of the town’s largest mansions, in 1509, but went back to Genoa as a boy and grew up there before returning to his birthplace in 1526, aged 17.11 A fourth, Angelo de Milanes, was originally from Florence. These men were all anxious to recoup what they could of the goods lost when the ship went down.

  Nothing could be done in the immediate aftermath of the shipwreck, due to the weather. Diving was a seasonal business; Francis himself said that the month of May was the best time for salvage work, while Erizzo commented that winter ‘was ever too cold and out of fashion and season’.12 The merchants hired Peter Paulo Corsi and his team to bring up the lost goods the following summer. For the months of July, August and September 1547 they were paid 2s 4d a day, and the cost of their ‘victualling’, that is their food and drink, was also covered. These meals, which included the luxury of meat, were taken at the Dolphin Inn, the principal inn of the town, which is still in business today.

  As the summer drew to an end, a lack of results caused relations with their employers to sour. Around Michaelmas (29 September), Corsi was detained and taken before the Mayor of Southampton, Thomas Beckingham. He was accused by two of the merchants, Domenico Erizzo and Bartholomew Fortini, of stealing their goods from the wreck of the Sancta Maria and Sanctus Edwardus. It was alleged that Corsi and his team went ‘craftily in the night time’ and stole two pieces of tin worth at least £20 together out of the wreck, one belonging to Erizzo and the other to Fortini. Corsi had, they claimed, then stashed one piece of tin under a bed in one Mr Pope’s house in Gosport, near Portsmouth. The whereabouts of the tin was reported to Niccolo de Marini, the Genoese merchant who had also lost goods aboard the ship, and he sent a servant to retrieve it. ‘After many words’ with Mr Pope, the servant found the piece of tin and carried it to the house of Edward Vaughan, the Captain of Portsmouth. Vaughan was, of course, already acquainted with Corsi, having paid him on the government’s behalf for his labours on the Mary Rose. It seems he had developed a rapport with the diving operator, because when Corsi claimed he’d simply found the tin on the seabed, away from the wreck, Vaughan took him at his word.

  In an act so brazen as to verge on utter recklessness, Corsi then took one piece of tin to the Florentine merchant Angelo de Milanes’s house, to see if he could get a reward for it. Milanes restored the tin to its rightful owner, Fortini, who offered Corsi a finder’s fee of 20s. Corsi complained that this was not enough, so Fortini and Erizzo joined forces to have him arrested. It transpired that he had in his possession a second piece of tin marked with Erizzo’s initials, ‘DE’, and the Mayor of Southampton ordered him to return it immediately to its rightful owner.

  When confronted with his crime, Corsi did not deny it. He only averred that his wages were too little for him and his servants, and so he felt justified in keeping some of the salvaged goods for himself. He was later overheard at the Dolphin tavern exclaiming that if he had taken two or three pieces more of tin, it still would not have been enough.

  Corsi was not detained long. Mayor Thomas Beckingham recalled he was ‘still at his liberty and not stopped one day’.13 It was Angelo de Milanes, of all people, who secured Corsi’s freedom. Vouching for a suspected thief sugge
sts Corsi’s salvaging services were simply indispensable.

  Soon afterwards, Corsi, fearing that he would be further troubled in Southampton for stealing the tin, came to London and obtained letters missive addressed to the Mayor of Southampton from Thomas Seymour, the Lord Admiral, which stated that he ‘should not be any time troubled, but permitted to pass quietly, without vexation’.14 His work for the crown in salvaging the Mary Rose took precedence over any other considerations; he must be free to continue.

  Erizzo was clearly not satisfied by how things had gone in Southampton. He may have had his tin returned, but Corsi had evaded any serious punishment. In December 1547, the Venetian merchant took his case to the High Court of Admiralty, which met in St Margaret’s Hill, London, south of the river, close to today’s Borough Market. The case rumbled on for two years, and many men gave testimony: merchants and sailors from Southampton, Venice and Florence, and from other parts of England, such as London and Devon.

  Jacques Francis testified on Wednesday 8 February 1548.15 He did not speak English very well, and so the court appointed an interpreter named John Tyrart to translate his words. What language did they converse in? Francis would have needed some means of communicating with his fellow divers and their Venetian master. Given the Portuguese presence in West Africa, Francis may well have spoken their language, albeit in some pidgin form, intermingled with his mother tongue.16 The court record gives no further information about Tyrart, but there was a vintner or wine merchant of that name living in Blackfriars, London, in 1554.17 Maybe Tyrart had picked up some Portuguese whilst importing wine? It was not unusual for merchants to act as interpreters for the court, usually as an informal favour to someone they knew who was involved in the case.18

  Through Tyrart, Francis explained that he was a member of Corsi’s household, and that he had known the Venetian for two years. He stated that he was about twenty years old and had been born in ‘Insula de Guinea’ or an island of Guinea. This could refer to any one of the large number of tiny islands off the West African coast, including the Cape Verde Islands, Fernando Po, São Tomé and Príncipe. The most likely candidate is Arguin (off Mauritania), where the Portuguese had built their first African trading fort. The island’s treacherous waters wrecked many ships, making it a plausible birthplace and training ground for a salvage diver.19 Francis had known Erizzo for about seven months, since the team had been hired to dive the Sancta Maria and Sanctus Edwardus wreck the previous July. The fact that he, of all of Corsi’s team of divers, was singled out to give testimony suggests that he was the most senior.20

  Francis did his best to defend his master from the accusations levelled against him. According to his evidence, the team ‘chanced to find in the sea at the Needles’ two hundred blocks of tin, a bell and some lead. The Needles, a series of rocks just off the most westerly tip of the Isle of Wight, was the site of many shipwrecks, and so a plausible location for such a discovery. They had, Francis claimed, found these items around Easter 1547, a few months before Corsi was commissioned to dive the Sancta Maria and Sanctus Edwardus. He also attested that Erizzo had caused his master to be detained for the whole month of May, to Corsi’s great cost. He had spent 300 crowns on the ‘instruments and vittles’ required to bring up the goods he had discovered, which subsequently went unused during the best time of year for diving work, and £700 worth of treasure remained on the seabed. Francis was adamant that Corsi had been falsely accused. Perhaps Francis and Corsi thought that if they could show that Erizzo had arrested him under false pretences, they might have a compensation claim against him. Francis’s assertion that Corsi had been detained throughout May 1547 is in complete contradiction of the accounts given by a host of other witnesses, who all said he was arrested for no more than a day or two at the end of September. Could Francis have tried to backdate and extend the length of the arrest to make it seem as if Corsi had really suffered at the merchants’ hands?

  Jacques Francis’s testimony demonstrates how good a diver he was. He was able to stay deep underwater long enough to ‘handle and see . . . [the tin, a bell and the lead] being there perished and forsaken’. To salvage heavy objects from the seabed, Francis must have mastered the art of free diving; that is, diving without any breathing apparatus. Still practised today, this requires years of training from an early age to develop the necessary lung capacity and mental strength, and to learn how to equalise the pressure in one’s ears, and breathe effectively.21

  One can paint a vivid picture of Francis as a child growing up on a West African island, learning to swim and dive from his parents and friends. The people of that region were said to be ‘the most expert swimmers in the world’, as Robert Baker and eight other Englishmen found when they were saved from a shipwreck on the Gold Coast in 1568. They used their diving ability to gather valuable currency: in Kongo, women dived for cowrie shells, while gold was brought up from the Ankobra riverbed in modern Ghana. Their aquatic skills could also be used for nefarious purposes. While on the coast of modern-day Liberia between 1599 and 1600, Johann von Lübelfing, a German soldier in Dutch employ, witnessed a theft by an adept African diver:

  They can swim below the water like a fish, as they proved there. One of them, who had a pewter tankard of beer in his hand and a soldier’s helmet on his head, jumped into the water with them and swam thus a great distance underwater; then he re-emerged and jumped into his little boat, which his companion had to bring to him. Thus he got away with the helmet and tankard, and no-one could overtake him.22

  Francis’s swimming and diving would have been equally impressive to the people of Southampton, as they were not skills known to the average Englishman, even sailors and port-dwellers. When Everard Digby published a treatise on the art of swimming in 1587, he had to illustrate it heavily to demonstrate the necessary strokes. Swimming was generally considered dangerous. ‘Perilous Pond’, north of Bunhill Fields in London, got its name because so many people drowned there. The Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge forbade his scholars from swimming there in 1571 with penalties including whipping, fines, being set in the stocks and expulsion for those caught twice. In his youth, the diplomat and writer Lord Edward Herbert of Cherbury’s mother made him promise never to swim, for ‘she had heard of more drowned than saved by it’.23 Even if one didn’t drown, immersing oneself in water was generally viewed with suspicion. The royal physician Andrew Boorde wrote that bathing ‘allowed the venomous airs to enter and destroyeth the lively spirits in man and enfeebleth the body’.24

  As most Renaissance Europeans were unable to swim, the free-diving skills of Africans such as Francis were admired and prized across Europe and the Atlantic world. A 1500 painting by Gentile Bellini, Miracle of the Cross at the Bridge of San Lorenzo, shows an African about to jump into a Venetian canal. In Genoa, Cardinal Bandinello Sauli employed an African as a swimming and diving instructor.25 Ferdinando I de Medici was saved from drowning in the River Arno in 1588 by ‘a negro of his, a very notable swimmer’.26 When Richard Hawkins visited the Spanish pearl fishery at La Margarita, off the north-eastern coast of Venezuela, in 1593, he observed that the Africans deployed there were ‘expert swimmers, and great divers’, who over time and with ‘continual practice’ had ‘learned to hold their breath long underwater, for the better achieving their work.’ Pieter de Marees, a Dutchman who travelled to the Gold Coast in 1602, noted that Venezuelan slaveholders sought men from that specific area to employ as pearl divers as they were ‘very fast swimmers and can keep themselves underwater for a long time. They can dive amazingly far, no less deep, and can see underwater.’27

  As well as diving for pearls, Africans were also employed in salvage operations. In September 1622, twenty-eight Spanish ships were wrecked by a hurricane the day after they left Havana. Twenty enslaved divers were sent to recover the silver and other goods aboard. Their master, Francisco Núñez Melián, inspired them in their work by promising freedom to the first man to discover a wreck. In due course, one of them found the remains of
the Santa Margarita, and was set free. The English were also beginning to exploit this expertise: on Edward Fenton’s abortive 1582 voyage to the East Indies, it was a ‘Negro’ who dived to retrieve the Edward’s lost anchor and cables. In 1622, two black indentured servants were paid for salvage operations on an English ship that was lost near Bermuda. The association became axiomatic. In George Chapman’s 1596 play The Blind Beggar of Alexandria, a character named Aegiale says he will ‘Moor-like, learn to swim and dive/into the bottom of the sea’.28

  In the course of Corsi’s trial, some called to testify spoke of the Venetian himself diving into the water. John Westcott, a London merchant, said he saw him ‘dive under the water with certain instruments’, while William Mussen, a sailor aboard Westcott’s ship, said he saw him ‘in the water’. Could he too have mastered the art of free diving or was he merely able to swim, enabling him to help collect the recovered goods when they reached the surface? A Venetian was certainly more likely to be able to dive than an Englishman; we know that Greeks and Southern Italians were diving for sponges in this period. Corsi may have been able to dive to about 25 to 30 feet. This is the threshold at which divers need to equalise the pressure in their ears. Failure to do this is very painful, and can result in ruptured eardrums and damaged sinuses, manifested as bleeding from ears, nose, and even the eyes. Francis would have known how to equalise and so was able to dive as deep as 90 feet. If Corsi’s diving team was structured in a similar way to that of the Spanish pearl diving teams, then we can imagine the Venetian as the patron, or owner of the boat, who employed a team of half-a-dozen divers led by an African expert. Clearly such men had to be treated well. If you wanted someone to be able to dive regularly, he had to be kept in peak physical condition.29 In this context, Corsi’s purchase of meat and drink at the Dolphin was a necessary investment in his skilled employees.