The chemistry of sunken artifacts

Sailors’ right-handed chemistry

In some ancient cultures, left-handedness was considered more than just not-right, but downright wicked. Lefties could even be accused of witchcraft. Their only real option then was to become righties. So when studying the skeletal remains recovered from a sunken warship from Tudor England, the Mary Rose, scientists kept this context at hand (PLOS One 2024, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0311717).

Commissioned by Henry VIII, the Mary Rose served for 34 years. In July 1545, the clash between the fleets of France and England during the Battle of the Solent, north of the Isle of Wight, proved to be the vessel’s last. According to testimony from one of the few surviving crew, the ship was turning to aim its guns when a fierce wind struck. As the ship lost control, cold water rushed in through the open gunports, tragically sinking it.

The Mary Rose lay at the bottom of the Solent strait for 437 years. And there it might have lain forever if not for its storied rediscovery and the hard work of many volunteers. Concluding in 1982, the final recovery included more than 28,000 dives and “was and still is the largest underwater archaeological excavation undertaken,” Alexzandra Hildred, head of research at the Mary Rose Trust, tells Newscripts. Involved ever since, Hildred began diving for the project in 1979.

Incredibly, the wreckage was well preserved despite being submerged for centuries, thanks to the strait’s currents washing sediment onto the site and encasing it in a protective anaerobic environment. This shell provided researchers with an amazing look into the lives of these sailors and allowed them to reliably investigate the sailors’ bone chemistry, says Sheona Shankland, lead author of the study and lecturer at the University of Glasgow Medical School.

The human remains found were all male, about 10 to 40 years old. Given the condemnation of lefties at the time, the scientists assumed the crew was right handed. They could then factor in handedness while studying “a bone that resides on either side of the human body”—the collarbone, Shankland tells Newscripts.

Collarbones have a unique growth pattern. One of the first bones to begin mineralization in utero, it is the last to fully fuse, in the early twenties. Most of the contents of bones lie in the extracellular matrix, which contains strengthening minerals and flexibility-giving proteins, and these exist in a dynamic balance.

Using Raman spectroscopy, researchers found that as the sailors aged, their collarbones gained minerals and lost protein. This change in bone chemistry was more pronounced in the right collarbone than the left, even in the younger, still-developing skeletons.

That the wear and tear from manual labor was greater for the sailors’ dominant-side collarbones suggests that our handedness affects the chemistry of our bones.

A binding thanks

This nautical saga doesn’t end there. One aspect of the Mary Rose’s recovery might have been kept a burning secret for decades.

The sediment that preserved the wreckage also made its recovery challenging. Tactics used to free the artifacts had to be strong enough to loosen them yet gentle enough not to turn them into ruins.

One diver working on the final excavation was shipwreck expert and former Royal Navy diver Richard Larn, enlisted by excavation leader Margaret Rule.

The website InsideHook reported in 2018 that, after delicate consideration, Larn suggested explosives. Though the late Rule conceded, she reportedly made him swear to keep his eruptive methods a secret until after her passing for fear of public opinion about how the irreplaceable national treasure was handled.

Newscripts has been unable to reach Larn to confirm. Though unaware of the report’s truth, Hildred of the Mary Rose Trust says she could imagine Rule warning Larn that sharing this without context “might be damaging to the image of the Mary Rose project.”

However he did it, Larn was gifted a coil of rope from the Mary Rose as a thank-you from Rule for his integral help in its recovery. The rope, which had resided at the Shipwreck Treasure Museum in St. Austell, England, sold at auction on Nov. 6 for $2,542.

Please send comments and suggestions to newscripts@acs.org.