The sinking of the Mary Rose in the Solent in 1545, with nearly all hands lost, was documented as a naval catastrophe and insured through royal treasury accounts — one of the earliest recorded examples of naval loss accounting in England.

The Mary Rose disaster occurred at the court of Henry VIII, the great patron of English Renaissance literature; court poets and chroniclers recorded such naval losses as part of a culture in which heroism, fortune, and catastrophic loss were central poetic themes.