The Mary Rose Salvage Diver: Jacques Francis

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The Mary Rose sank in 1545 during the Battle of Solent whilst leading an attack against the French invasion fleet. Nearly 500 men sadly lost their lives when she sank just off the coast of Portsmouth. In 1982 The Mary Rose was brought back up to the surface and she now resides in the Mary Rose Museum along with thousands of other artefacts from the ship.

 I first heard of Jacques Francis during a documentary about the Mary Rose. He was an African salvage diver who helped bring up the canons from the sunken ship a couple of years after she sank. There didn’t seem to be a great deal known about Francis and I didn’t expect to hear anything else about him, so, imagine my delight when I was reading Miranda Kaufmann’s book Black Tudors: The Untold Story and I saw there was a whole chapter dedicated to him!


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The ship and her contents were worth a lot of money and not long after the Mary Rose sunk, Henry VIII tried to have the ship brought back up. He hired salvage divers to try and haul the ship upright by pulling on her masts, this did not work so the plans were abandoned. However, the canons were worth a lot of money, so another salvage operation was planned to bring them back up to the surface and this is where we meet Jacques Francis!

Francis was born in the 1520s, on an island off the coast of Guinea. We know this because of a court document at the London National Archives in which he was defending his employer against an accusation of theft. Jacques Francis was the first African to give evidence in an English court. In 1547 he was part of a team of 8 men working for the Italian salvage operator Peter Paulo Corsi. They were hired to bring up as much of the Mary Rose’s weaponry as they could.

 ^The Wreck of the Mary Rose by Jon Adams, used with the kind permission of The Mary Rose Trust.

Francis would have been employed due to his ability of being able to dive to great depths and it is likely he gained this skill during pearl diving in Guinea. Obviously, he would have had no specialist breathing equipment like today’s divers and conditions underwater would have been very cold and dark. I did not appreciate how poor visibility could have been until I watched an episode of Time Team (series 3, Episode 4) in which they performed an underwater excavation of a 400-year-old shipwreck. Although the Time Team dive was in shallower waters than Francis would have faced during his dive of the Mary Rose, the visibility was still extremely poor. I couldn’t help but think how hard it must have been in deeper waters, without a mask and breathing apparatus. Not to mention hauling Canons to the surface!


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A lot of people wrongly assume that Tudor England was full of only white faces, you may also assume that Jacques Francis was a slave living in England, but that wasn't the case, as Miranda Kauffman states in her book Black Tudors: The Untold Story “…that Francis was allowed to testify in an English court of law is powerful evidence that he was not considered a slave. Enslaved or unfree people have been prevented from testifying throughout history, partly due to the concern that they would be forced by their circumstances to say whatever their masters told them to say.” It was also referenced in the court papers that Francis was paid a wage, which he wouldn't have been given if he was a slave. He was also likely fed reasonably well to ensure he kept fit due to the type of work he was doing.

On the subject of both the Mary Rose and of Africans living and working in Tudor England, there were at least two men of African heritage on board the ship when she sank. During the documentary Skeletons of the Mary Rose: The New Evidence on Channel 4, we see that isotope analysis carried out on one of the skeletons found on the wreck and nicknamed the Archer Royal, indicates that he came from North-Africa. Another of the skeletons that were found, and nicknamed Henry showed he was of British origin, but a DNA test showed that he was of African heritage. This is one of the ways that show us Tudor England was so much more multi-cultured than we previously thought it to be. I highly recommend reading Miranda Kaufmann’s book to find out more about the stories of African Tudors. I will be posting my thoughts on the book on my blog at some point in the future.

                  References: 

-     Kaufmann, Miranda, Black Tudors: The Untold Story, 2017

-     Archer Royal blog post on www.maryrose.org - https://maryrose.org/blog/many-faces-of-tudor-england/museum-blogger/changing-the-face-of-tudor-england/

-     Documentary on Channel 4: Skeletons of the Mary Rose: The New Evidence

-     Ridgway, Claire, On This Day in Tudor History, 2015

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