Based on part of “The Mary Rose – Her 34 Year Maiden Voyage”, a Third Thursday Talk by Simon M. Clabby
June 11th, 1539. The Mary Rose is docked in Deptford. On this particular night, Richard Baker, also known as “Skenthroppe”, and three others, Robert Grygges, William Oram and Marmaduke Colman, having dined aboard the Mary Rose, decide to go ashore and visit a pub. Unusually for sailors, they were finished by 10pm, and headed back to their ship. Unfortunately for them, the boat had gone back, and there was no way of calling for it to be returned. They were faced with two options; find lodgings for the night and face the music in the morning, or make their own way back. Alcohol being involved, they decided to do the latter.
After some searching, they found a boat which they ‘borrowed’, and with the single oar they could find tried to make their way back to the Mary Rose. Again, due to alcohol being involved, they missed, the currents of the Thames being too strong, and they instead collided with a Portuguese Merchant vessel, Saynte John de Cangas, which they then proceded to board. Now, as you can imagine, being woken by four drunken sailors in the middle of the night isn’t going to go down well, and the Portuguese threw stones at the nocturnal interlopers, one of which struck Oram on the head, apparently drawing blood. Oram drew his sword, and attacked the Portuguese, striking them with the flat edge, until they withdrew below decks.
The four drunken sailors then decided that they needed compensation for their trouble, and helped themselves to some of the ships cargo, breaking open three chests and taking rolls of cloth, shirts and a sugar loaf weighing 8lb. After about an hour, the sailors departed in the same boat. Part of their haul was found in the mud of the Thames at Greenwich, where the sailors had obviously decided to dump it. The rest doesn’t appear to have been recovered. The sailors themselves appear to have retired to Baker’s house, where they spent the night before returning to the Mary Rose. If only they’d done that in the first place...
The details above come from Admiralty Court records, where formal charges were taken against Baker, Grygges, Oram and Colman. Sadly, there are no surviving records of whether they were found guilty, but the statements seem to show that even the mariners themselves admitted they’d done it, albeit under the age-old excuse “we were drunk”. What sentence was passed will remain a mystery though.
This, and other interesting snippets from the life of the Mary Rose, can be found in Letters from the Mary Rose by CS Knighton and David Loades, which is sadly out of print, but can still be found online. We also recommend The Warship "Mary Rose": The Life and Times of King Henry's VIII's Flagship by David Childs, which gives a full history of the Mary Rose.
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