11. The Revolutionary Mary Rose
The English ship Mary Rose, commissioned in 1511, was among the pioneers of a revolution in naval warfare. It relied on cannons that fired not from the top deck as had been the norm since guns were introduced to ships, but from portholes cut into the hull on lower decks. As such, she helped usher in the transition of naval combat from an era in which ships rammed each other before men grappled and boarded the enemy, to the age of massed gun broadsides.
The Mary Rose was a success, and gave the Royal Navy decades of solid service until 1536, when she underwent an unfortunate redesign and upgrade. The idea seems to have boiled down to “cannons are good, so more cannons are better“. That turned out to be a blunder. The logic was not bad in itself, but it could be problematic to add more cannons to a ship that had not been specifically designed to accommodate more cannons and bear their additional weight. The Mary Rose was such a ship.
