Since my stays in Copenhagen and Oslo also left me with “so little time,” you might wonder why I reserved that description for Stockholm. It’s largely because Stockholm is so dense with museums – nearly 100 – that it simply makes sense.
At the end of the previous post, I’d gotten off the bus on Djurgården – Stockholm’s recreation island. Here’s a partial list of places you can see there:
Skansen
Vasa Museum
Others I haven’t listed include, in particular, Abba: The Museum. I’d tried to purchase tickets online Monday night but the website repeatedly rejected my credit card. Tuesday, I twice allowed the inordinately lengthy lines to intimidate me into forgoing my chance to become the fifth member of Abba.
Time and distance constraints kept me from reaching the Norra begravningsplatsen or “The Northern Cemetery” in the suburb of Solna.
Based on the strong recommendations from two Testudo Times acquaintances, I made my first stop the Vasamuseet.
The Vasa Story
Recall that in the 17th century Sweden was one of the great European powers. King Gustav II Adolphus had initiated a war with Poland-Lithuania in 1621 that would last eight years. In 1626, he commissioned the construction of what was, up to that time, the largest warship ever built. In truth, the King commissioned four ships – two small ones and the two large ones – the Vasa and the Äpplet. The latter sailed until the 1660s. The former met a more sudden and dramatic fate.
As I noted, at the time of their construction, the Vasa and its sister ship were the largest warships ever attempted. Each had two gundecks (they were among the first ships with this distinction) and Vasa carried 64 canons weighing more than 1.5 tons each. Bearing the name of the Swedish royal family and adorned with highly symbolic carvings and sculptures intended to display the wisdom and military power of the monarch, the Vasa, approximately 70 meters long and 12 meters wide with its tallest mast reaching 55 meters, was to be the pride of the Swedish Navy. A model in the museum shows how the finished version likely looked:
In part because the Dutch were considered the greatest shipbuilders of the time, two Dutchmen oversaw the project. The first was the master shipwright Henrik Hybertsson who had never attempted to design and build a ship of this size. The other was a merchant, Arendt de Groote, whose principal task was to secure the material – wood, paint, cloth, and rope fibers that the ship’s construction required.
De Groote’s role was, in some ways, more critical than Hybertsson’s. The construction of Vasa alone needed wood from 1,000 oak trees. Much of this had to be imported because of limits on felling oaks in Sweden. De Groote imported some of that wood from Poland, which was to be, ironically, the target of Vasa’s guns. Even more ironically, de Groote needed to circumvent a royally declared Swedish embargo of all trade with Poland. He bought the wood from Poland and had it shipped to Amsterdam. There, its source was concealed before sending it to Sweden embargo be damned.
One of Gustav’s vice-admirals expressed concerns about the ship’s stability because it had failed the lurch test. Nevertheless, after nearly two years under construction, Gustav ordered the ship’s launch on 10 August 1628. Nearly all of Swedish nobility, royals from other European countries, and most of Stockholm’s population ringed the harbor as the great ship set sail.
Within a few hundred meters of setting out, the ship began to list but the crew managed to set it aright. With the otherwise watertight gun ports open, the canons fired a salute, once again unbalancing the ship. This time, the crew couldn’t set the ship right, the gun ports, already dangerously low by virtue of the ship’s design, reached the water line and, because they were open, the ship began to take on water. With a life even briefer than the Titanic, a mere 1,300 meters into its maiden voyage, Vasa sank to the bottom of Stockholm’s harbor.
Of course, the embarrassed king immediately launched an inquiry into finding the reason the ship sank and naming an appropriate scapegoat. The first target was de Groote who quite cleverly evaded any responsibility by claiming that he was merely a merchant who had acquired the materials specified by the shipwright thus pointing the finger of blame directly at his mentor and partner Henrik Hybertsson. Hybertsson used a less ingenious way of avoiding responsibility. The master shipwright became ill sometime in 1625 and ceded supervision of the construction to another Dutchman, Henrik Jacobsson. Hybberston died in 1627 a year or so before the Vasa disaster.
So, how did Jacobsson manage to escape any punishment? He, too, pointed toward Hybertsson stating that he had simply built the ship as his predecessor, who had followed the specifications approved by the king, had directed.
The reason the Vasa sank but its companion the Åpplet didn’t was the subject of centuries of speculation. The three most common suppositions have all proven inaccurate. Theory one: When the salute was fired, the guns recoiled and rolled across the deck causing the instability that sank the ship. However, when the ship was salvaged, all the gun carriages were in place. Theory one debunked.
Theory two: The ship didn’t carry enough ballast. Records show that the ship carried 120 tons of rock for ballast. Calculations and simulations made with current technology show that, not only was this sufficient, but that had the ship carried more ballast it would have been even less stable. This sinks theory two.
Theory three: The crew was drunk and unable to set the ship aright when it began to list. Given that no records exist of alcohol on board, that as was traditional at the time for a maiden voyage many of the crew had family on board, and most importantly, that the ship was launched on a Sunday when the crew would have been coming from church rather than drinking, this theory, unlike the ship, also fails to hold water.
In fact, three factors combined to pull Vasa to the bottom of Stockholmsström. First, the otherwise watertight gun ports were open thus allowing the ship to take on water. Second, the waterline shows that over 15 meters of the ship sat above the water while only four meters were below creating an unmanageably high center of gravity that contributed to the ship’s instability.
But why did Vasa sink when its sister ship didn’t? Well, the final, and probably most important reason is that Åpplet was about one meter wider than Vasa and this meter provided just enough stability to keep the former afloat.
Vasa’s Resurrection
The first attempt to raise the ship came a mere three days after it sank. Using principals similar to those that would be used to raise the ship more than 300 years later, an English engineer, Ian Bulmer, managed to right the ship but lacked the lifting power and technology to actually raise it from the bottom of the harbor. Instead, he succeeded in miring it more immovably in the mud. This helped preserve the ship and proved a boon when it was rediscovered in 1956.
The canons were another matter. It’s likely that the canons cost nearly twice the total construction cost of the ship itself. Thus, 61 of the 64 canons were salvaged within 30 years of the ship’s sinking. No one knows the fate of those canons so only three are on display in the museum today.
The ship essentially passed into legend until an amateur archaeologist, Anders Franzén, eventually located the ship in 1956 just off the island of Beckholmen. The Vasa was largely intact because the cold and brackish waters of the Baltic are free from shipworms and woodworms. Also, the mud that covered the ship had acted as something of a preservative.
The effort to raise Vasa began in August 1959 and, after scores of gradual lifts the ship finally broke the surface of the water on 24 April 1961. Nearly 333 years had passed but Vasa was once again visible to the citizens of Sweden and the world.
For the next 27 years, the ship sat in a facility called The Vasa Shipyard (Wasavarvet in Swedish). The public could visit it and conservators could work on it but the facility was cramped and not designed for either type of activity let alone both so, after much haggling, the Swedes decided to build Vasa a new home. They broke ground on the current Vasa Museum in 1987 and, with three of the four walls constructed, the ship was floated into the partially completed building in December 1988 on the concrete pontoon on which it had stood since 1961. The Vasa Museum (all my photos are here) officially opened to the public in 1990. Here’s the Vasa as it looks today:
But this day’s not yet over. I have more Stockholm experiences to share but for now, you’ll have to wait for my next post.