Giant jigsaw of ‘Welsh Mary Rose’ starts to come together

WHEN the remnants of a wine-trading vessel were found in the muddy banks of Newport’s river Usk, archaeologists knew immediately they had stumbled on something of huge significance.

But history does not always march to a modern timetable and only now – 20 years on from that accidental discovery during the construction of the Welsh town’s Riverfront Theatre – can work begin to reassemble the historic craft.

It has taken that long for specialists to dry out, restore and treat more than 2,500 of the 550-year-old timbers.

Now begins the task of piecing together what has been described as the world’s largest 3D puzzle.

It will take time, patience and luck to reconstruct the vessel, launched aroung 1449, known since its discovery in 2002 as the Newport Ship.

Dan Snow, the historian and television presenter, described the ship as a “missing link” whose discovery and restoration illuminates the moment in naval history just before the European powers set sail for the New World.

“The ship comes at the birth of an era that changed the world in every way imaginable,” he told The Daily Telegraph. “It was a coastal trader, taking wool from the British Isles to Iberia and returning from there with wines, and it came a generation before we turned our attention across the Atlantic.”

When the puzzle is complete, the ship will rival Henry VIII’S flagship the Mary Rose, raised from the Solent in 1982, and the Vasa warship in Stockholm, salvaged with a largely intact hull in 1961.

Toby Jones, project curator for the Newport Medieval Ship Project, said: “The Mary Rose is the world’s 16th-century ship, the Vasa is the world’s 17thcentury ship – Newport will be the world’s 15th-century ship. There’ll be nothing else like it in the world.”

But the ship’s restoration will also be unlike that of any previously undertaken, in complexity and scale.

“The Mary Rose and Vasa were never taken apart, they were conserved and put on display whole – we have the largest ship that has ever been attempted to be put back together,” Mr Jones told BBC Wales.

Yesterday, the task of freeze-drying the timbers, some 13 metres long, finally came to an end, with the last batch of 100 collected from the Mary Rose museum in Portsmouth.