Way back in the early 1600s, the King of Sweden, King Gustav II Adolph decided he wanted to build the biggest and best warship ever. So he commissioned a ship builder and things got under way.
After more than two years of construction, his ship, the Vasa, was finished. Standing more than 50 metres high, with its hull built with the trunks of more than 1000 oak trees she was ready to sail and protect her country. The ship was decorated with beautiful sculptures filled with symbolism, depicting Roman and Greek Gods and mysticism, and was full of colour.
At completion, Vasa was a thing of beauty, tall and graceful, and a ship to be contended with with 64 canons of various sizes and a crew of 450, 300 of whom were soldiers.
While Vasa was not the largest ship afloat, or the ship with the most cannons, she had one feature that made her fearsome as a battle ship: her broadside. The combined weight of shot that could be fired from one side of the ship was 300 kilograms. While I know I wouldn’t want this aimed at me or any boat I was in, I confess I don’t really know what it means. But all the literature and the Vasa website indicate that this made her a great and fearsome warship.
Only one thing went wrong at her launch back in 1628.
She sank.
She sailed about 1300 metres then tipped over and sank.
Scale model of the Vasa in front of the real thing. Model shows colours the way researchers believe them to have been on the ship as built.
Like many people in power, the King thought he knew more about building the ship than the qualified shipbuilder and throughout the building process sent over design changes he expected to see implemented. And did regular inspections to ensure that happened. Hmmm do we ever see things like this today? No, never in my experience.
At any rate, throughout the building process, Kingie kept sending changes to the plan and at the end, he had a tall graceful ship that was top heavy. In spite of the ballast she carried, the first big wave tipped the ship over, killing 25 or 30 people in the process.
Of course the king commissioned a task force to look into the cause and apportion blame. Of course no one was ever found to be responsible.
The ship sank in fairly deep water so sat on the bottom until the 1960s when diving and salvaging technology allowed a successful raising. It was a complex and long process that raised her.
From then until just a couple of years ago Vasa has been the subject of intensive recovery operations. She was kept wet for decades to preserve her wooden hull. Then she was constantly sprayed with the ingredients used to make lipstick and face moisturizer until preservatives could be applied.
Years of research went into discovering the exact colours used in the various statues and carvings on the ship and a scale model reproduction has been built showing the ship in its full colour glory.
The ship itself is on display in a Stockholm museum dedicated to the Vasa. It is 98 per cent original parts. They are currently replacing all the iron bolts so that the rust from them won’t damage the wooden structure.
The audio visual material at the museum indicated that there is something about the composition of the Baltic Sea’s water that prevented the ship from being eroded by the salt water….apparently water in any other ocean would have destroyed it in decades.
During the recovery, 16 skeletons were recovered, some with clothing still intact, and while research and recovery on the ship was underway, so too was research on the skeletons. Forensic specialists reconstructed faces from skulls and life stories from bone, tooth and fragments of clothing. I thought this just happened in books. Part of the museum is dedicated to the reconstructed “busts” of several of these people along with what researchers have been able to discover about their lives. Broken bones, bad teeth and humped spines tell a story of malnourishment and hard lives. If you think Madam Tussaud’s is eerie, you should see these recreations. They are so real, their skin looks moist.
More than 40,000 “objects” were found during the recovery, in addition to the ship’s hull. These objects were stored in water for a decade while the means of preserving them were found, often invented. These objects were made of wood, leather, fabric, iron, and so on. Each required a different storage method to ensure preservation.
The ship is unique. No other ship from the 1600s exists. And it and the discoveries made because of it are giving us a real snapshot of life in the 1600s. I guess a ship sinking at its launch isn’t such a bad thing, at least not for future generations.
We spent hours at this museum. It was fascinating.
In the same vein but in more modern time, we were taking an “under the bridges” canal tour, now in Copenhagen. At one point the guide said “. . . and just ahead is a bridge being built for pedestrians and cyclists. It was supposed to be finished by now, but has been severely delayed because the company building it has gone bankrupt.
“Not only that,” she continued, “when we get closer you will see that they were building the bridge from both sides intending it to meet in the middle, and one side is significantly higher than the other. The expected completion date is about six months from now.”
As we cruised by, we could see people in hard hats scurrying around. Most of them were white hard hats. I’m told that white hats are managers.
