2525) Did You Know Series (69): a) Vasa or Wasa A warship built between 1626-28, Sweden: b) The Vasa Museum, Stockholm, Sweden:
Vasa or Wasa was a Swedish warship built between 1626 and 1628.
The ship sank after sailing roughly 1,300 m (1,400 yd) into her maiden voyage on 10.08.1628.
She fell into obscurity after most of her valuable bronze cannons were salvaged in the 17th Century, until she was located again in the late 1950s in a busy shipping area in Stockholm harbour.
The ship was salvaged with a largely intact hull in 1961.
She was housed in a temporary museum called "Wasavarvet" ("The Vasa Shipyard") until 1988 and then moved permanently to the Vasa Museum in the Royal National City Park in Stockholm.
The ship is one of Sweden's most popular tourist attractions and has been seen by over 35 million visitors since 1961.
Since her recovery, Vasa has become a widely recognized symbol of the Swedish Empire.
The ship was built on the orders of the King of Sweden Gustavus Adolphus II as part of the military expansion he initiated in a war with Poland-Lithuania (1621–1629).
In January 1625, the Swedish king signed a contract with the Dutch master shipwright Henrik Hybertsson and his business partner, Arendt de Groote.
They were to build four new ships. One of them, Vasa, was to be the most powerful warship in the Baltic, if not in the world. It was the beginning of one of the most spectacular fiascos in Swedish history.
The Vasa was constructed at the navy yard in Stockholm under the contract with the private entrepreneurs in 1626–1627 and armed primarily with bronze cannons cast in Stockholm specifically for the ship.
Richly decorated as a symbol of the king's ambitions for Sweden and himself, upon completion she was one of the most powerfully armed vessels in the world.
In 1626, Vasa´s keel was laid in the late winter at Skeppsgården, the navy yard, in Stockholm.
Master Henrik Hybertsson, already ill when construction starts, could no longer supervise the other shipwrights by the summer and handed over responsibility for the new ship to his assistant, Hein Jakobsson. Barely a year later, Vasa´s designer is dead.
In 1627, the King´s newest and most powerful ship, Vasa, was launched in the spring and hundreds of craftsmen worked through the summer to finish the hull and rigging.
When completed, it was 69.00 metres (226 feet) long and more than 52.50 metres tall from the keel to the top of the main mast.
The ship weighed over 1200 tonnes once outfitted with ten sails, 64 cannons (including 48 twenty-four pounders, 8 three-pounders, 2 one pounders and 6 stormstycken or Howitzers). It had 120 tonnes of ballast and hundreds of sculptures. The propulsion was by 1275 sq m sails (13,720 sq ft) and had a crew of 145 sailors and 300 soldiers on board. A giant of a ship of its time was born.
However, Vasa was dangerously unstable, with too much weight in the upper structure of the hull. Despite this lack of stability, she was ordered to sea and foundered only a few minutes after encountering a wind stronger than a breeze.
In the summer of 1628, the admiral does not listen to the warning bells.
The captain supervising the construction of Vasa, Söfring Hansson, called Vice Admiral Klas Fleming down to the ship, moored at the royal palace, because he was worried.
He has thirty men run back and forth across the deck and the ship rolled alarmingly.
The Admiral had the demonstration stopped, afraid that the ship will sink at the quay itself.
Under pressure from the King to get the ship to sea, he ordered Söfring to sail anyway. Months later, Vasa set off on its first and last voyage.
The order to sail was the result of a combination of factors.
The king, who was leading the army in Poland at the time of her maiden voyage, was impatient to see her take up her station as flagship of the reserve squadron at Älvsnabben in the Stockholm Archipelago.
At the same time the king's subordinates lacked the political courage to openly discuss the ship's problems or to have the maiden voyage postponed.
On 10.08.1628, the Vasa sailed on its short maiden voyage of 1,300 metres and no farther.
Still within sight of the shipyard where it was built, Vasa heeled to port under a gust and water gushed in through the open gun-ports.
Within minutes, the ship was lying on the sea bed 32.00 metres below. Thousands of Stockholm´s inhabitants witnessed the tragic scene, together with several foreign ambassadors. What began in hope and ambition ends in tragedy.
Although the warship was very near to shore, some 30 to 150 people onboard drowned during the vessel's very first voyage.
In Autumn 1628 a fearful Royal Council wrote to tell the king of the disaster:
An inquiry was organised by the Swedish Privy Council to find those responsible for the disaster, but in the end no one was punished.
The ship´s officers claimed innocence. The builders were adamant that they had built the ship according to the design the king had approved.
The experts believed that the ship had too little belly, not enough hull to carry the heavy upper works.
The blame fell on the designer, Henrik Hybertsson, for the poor proportions. Master Henrik, dead for more than a year, could not defend himself nor could he be punished.
Chief causes of sinking:
Vasa sank because it had very little initial stability, which can be thought of as resistance to heeling over under the force of wind or waves acting on the hull.
The reason for this was that the distribution of mass in the hull structure and the ballast, guns, provisions, and other objects loaded on board put too much weight too high in the ship.
The centre of gravity was too high, and so it took very little force to make the ship heel over, and there was not enough righting moment, force trying to make the ship return to an upright position.
The reason that the ship had such a high centre of gravity was not due to the guns. These weighed little over 60 tonnes (130 thousand pounds), or about 5% of the total displacement of the loaded ship.
This was a relatively low weight and should have been bearable in a ship this size.
The problem was in the hull construction itself. The part of the hull above the waterline was too high and too heavily built in relation to the amount of hull in the water.
The headroom in the decks was higher than necessary for crewmen who were, on average, only 1.67 meters (5 feet 5½ inches) tall, and thus the weight of the decks and the guns they carried was higher above the waterline than needed.
In addition, the deck beams and their supporting timbers were over-dimensioned and too closely spaced for the loads they carried, so they contributed too much weight to the already tall and heavy upper works.
The use of different measuring systems on either side of the vessel caused its mass to be distributed asymmetrically, heavier to port.
During construction both Swedish feet and Amsterdam feet were in use by different teams. Archaeologists have found four rulers used by the workmen who built the ship. Two were calibrated in Swedish feet, which had 12 inches, while the other two measured Amsterdam feet, which had 11 inches.
Although the mathematical tools for calculating or predicting stability were still more than a century in the future, and 17th-century scientific ideas about how ships behaved in water were deeply flawed, the people associated with building and sailing ships for the Swedish navy were very much aware of the forces at work and their relationships to each other.
In the last part of the inquest held after the sinking, a group of master shipwrights and senior naval officers were asked for their opinions about why the ship sank.
Their discussion and conclusions show very clearly that they knew what had happened, and their verdict was summed up very clearly by one of the captains, who said that the ship did not have enough "belly" to carry the heavy upperworks.
Common practice of the time dictated that heavy guns were to be placed on the lower gun deck to decrease the weight on the upper gun deck and improve stability.
The armament plans were changed many times during the build to either 24-pounders on the lower deck along with lighter 12-pounders on the upper deck or 24-pounders on both decks.
The gun ports on the upper deck were the correct size for 12-pounders, but in the end the ship was finished with the heavy 24-pounders on both decks, and this may have contributed to poor stability.
Vasa might not have sunk on 10.08.1628, if the ship had been sailed with the gunports closed.
Ships with multiple tiers of gunports normally had to sail with the lowest tier closed, since the pressure of wind in the sails would usually push the hull over until the lower gunport sills were under water.
For this reason, the gunport lids are made with a double lip which is designed to seal well enough to keep out most of the water.
Captain Söfring Hansson had ordered the lower gundeck ports closed once the ship began to take on water, but by then it was too late. If he had done it before he sailed, Vasa might not have sunk on that day.
Fishing for cannons by Salvors and assorted chancers:
The sunken ship became a tempting target for salvors and assorted chancers. Repeated attempts to raise the ship failed because it is firmly stuck in the mud of the harbour bottom.
Finally, 35 years after the sinking, a team of divers led by Albrecht von Treileben and Andreas Peckell succeeded in bringing up almost all of Vasa´s cannons. They used a recently perfected invention, the diving bell, to reach the ship, rip up the deck, and extract guns, which are sold abroad.
In 1920, Vasa was nearly turned into furniture:
Two brothers from Oskarshamn, Simon and Leonard Olschanski, applied for permission to salvage ships sunk in Stockholm harbour between Beckholmen (where Vasa lay), and Tegelviken.
They planned to blow up the wrecks to get black oak, waterlogged wood, which is popular in Sweden for Art Deco furniture.
But the authorities refused their proposal - a crucial decision that made it possible for the Vasa Museum to exist today.
In 1956 Anders Franzén got evidence, during search operations for the wreck of Vasa that the ship probably lay there:
On 25.08.1956 Anders Franzén, a fuels engineer, finally got a bite.
Dark winter days poring over old documents in dusty archives, rainy summer days dragging the bottom of Stockholm harbour, led to this.
After his drag had once again caught an obstruction on the bottom, his coring device returned to the surface with a plug of black, waterlogged oak.
Another core 20 meters away produced the same result. There was something big, old and wooden on the bottom in front of the island of Beckholmen.
Franzén had enough evidence to persuade the navy to send a diving team to investigate. Could it be Vasa?
In September 1958, there was a news frenzy on Swedish Radio:
Swedish radio interrupted its regular programming and broadcasts direct from the salvage operation when one of Vasa's cannon was brought up from the deep.
Each new find, each twist and turn in the saga of raising the ship became a news story.
Vasa emerged on the international stage as a celebrity, and Per Edvin Fälting became a media hero, a tough, no-nonsense dive boss, everyman getting the job done.
In August 1959 Vasa moved for the first time in 331 years:
The proposals were many and imaginative, everything from filling Vasa with ping-pong balls to freezing it in a giant ice-cube.
But the Neptune Company insisted on a tried-and-tested method, used since the Middle Ages to raise sunken ships.
Divers spent more than two years digging tunnels and passing cables under the ship up to floating pontoons.
On 20.08.1959, the pumps started in the pontoons and Vasa freed itself from the mud.
The ship was lifted and moved under the water surface in 18 stages, and in September Vasa lay at a depth of 17 metres by the island of Kastellholmen. Divers were to spend another year and a half preparing the ship for the final lift.
In April 1961 The Vasa ended its "long beauty sleep", and emerged after 333 years of hibernation:
Many Stockholm residents probably remember that it was Monday, 24.04.1961. People by the thousands crowded in with Swedish and international media around Kastellholmen when Vasa first appeared from the deep after 333 years of hibernation. A ship from the 17th century was headline material in newspapers around the world.
The Salvage Operations for the Vasa in 1961:
During the 1961 recovery, thousands of artifacts and the remains of at least 15 people were found in and around Vasa's hull by marine archaeologists.
Among the many items found were clothing, weapons, cannons, tools, coins, cutlery, food, drink and six of the ten sails.
The artifacts and the ship herself have provided scholars with invaluable insights into details of naval warfare, shipbuilding techniques and everyday life in early 17th-century Sweden.
Presently Vasa is the world's best preserved 17th century ship and the most visited museum in Scandinavia. The wreck of Vasa continually undergoes monitoring and further research on how to preserve her.
Vasa had four preserved decks - the upper and lower gun decks, the hold and the orlop.
Because of the constraints of preparing the ship for conservation, the archaeologists had to work quickly, in 13-hour shifts during the first week of excavation.
The upper gun deck was greatly disturbed by the various salvage projects between 1628 and 1961, and it contained not only material that had fallen down from the rigging and upper deck, but also more than three centuries of harbor refuse.
The decks below were progressively less disturbed. The gundecks contained not just gun carriages, the three surviving cannons, and other objects of a military nature, but were also where most of the personal possessions of the sailors had been stored at the time of the sinking.
These included a wide range of loose finds, as well as chests and casks with spare clothing and shoes, tools and materials for mending, money (in the form of low-denomination copper coins), privately purchased provisions, and all of the everyday objects needed for life at sea.
Most of the finds were of wood, testifying not only to the simple life on board, but to the generally unsophisticated state of Swedish material culture in the early 17th century.
The lower decks were primarily used for storage, and so the hold was filled with barrels of provisions and gunpowder, coils of anchor cable, iron shot for the guns, and the personal possessions of some of the officers.
On the Orlop deck, a small compartment contained six of the ship's ten sails, rigging spares, and the working parts for the ship's pumps. Another compartment contained the possessions of the ship's carpenter, including a large tool chest.
After the ship itself had been salvaged and excavated, the site of the loss was excavated thoroughly during 1963–1967.
This produced many items of rigging tackle as well as structural timbers that had fallen off, particularly from the beak head and stern castle.
Most of the sculptures that had decorated the exterior of the hull were also found in the mud, along with the ship's anchors and the skeletons of at least four people.
The last object to be brought up was the nearly 12-metre-long (39 ft) longboat, called "Esping" in Swedish, found lying parallel to the ship and believed to have been towed by Vasa when it sank.
On February 1962, Vasa was displayed to the public:
By Friday 16.02.1962, the ship was ready to be displayed to the general public at the newly constructed Vasa Shipyard, where visitors could see Vasa while a team of conservators, carpenters and other technicians worked to preserve the ship.
The museum opened with a salute from two of Vasa's cannon. Public interest was enormous and success was immediate – in 1962, 439,300 visitors bought a ticket to see the ship and its unique finds.
In April 1962, "Operation Preserve Vasa" commenced in right earnest:
Reconstructing and preserving a mighty warship from the 17th Century was an enormous challenge.
When waterlogged wood dries out, and the moisture in it evaporates, it shrinks and cracks.
In order to prevent Vasa from being destroyed, conservation of the ship began using polyethylene glycol, PEG, to replace the water.
Loose objects were placed in large baths, while the hull of the ship was sprayed around the clock with the help of 500 nozzles and an elaborate pumping and filtering system. This treatment continued until 1979.
By 1979-1989, the drying out process was nearly complete:
Some things just take time. Even after being sprayed for 17 years, the ship had a long way to go.
The wood has to dry slowly to avoid cracking, and over the next ten years the humidity was gradually lowered.
In fact, drying will go on for decades until the ship stabilizes completely.
In 1990, Vasa got a new home:
384 proposals from all over the Nordic countries were received when an architectural competition to build the new Vasa Museum was launched in 1981.
Swedish architects Hidemark Månsson Arkitektkontor AB won against tough competition and, on 15.06.1990, the new museum was officially opened.
The ship is presently the centrepiece of themed exhibits about all aspects of naval life in the early 17th century.
In 2011, Vasa celebrated its 50th anniversary and saw a record visitor numbers:
When Vasa celebrated the 50th Anniversary (1961-2021) of its recovery from the depths, the Vasa Museum set a new record with well over 1.2 million visitors.
After half a century of conservation and restoration work, the success of Vasa is easy to understand - it is a unique, intact ship from a forgotten time.
Over 98% of the original structure survives, including masts and sails, so it does not look like a wreck, but a ship awaiting the start of the next voyage, just as Vasa looked in the winter of 1628.
The reason why Vasa was so well-preserved:
It was not just that the shipworm that normally devours wooden ships was absent but also that the water of Stockholms ström was heavily polluted until the late 20th century.
The highly toxic and hostile environment meant that even the toughest microorganisms that break down wood had difficulty surviving.
This, along with the fact that Vasa had been newly built and was undamaged when it sank, contributed to her conservation.
However, the properties of the water also had a negative effect. Chemicals present in the water around Vasa had penetrated the wood, and the timber was full of the corrosion products from the bolts and other iron objects which had disappeared.
Once the ship was exposed to the air, reactions began inside the timber that produced acidic compounds.
Nevertheless, the cold, oxygen-poor water of the Baltic Sea protected Vasa from the bacteria and worms that usually digest wooden wrecks.
Almost 98 percent of Vasa's wood was intact when Sweden finally raised the wreck in 1961.
New bolts:
It took seven years to replace her 4,000 rusty iron bolts, but Vasa is in much better shape for it. Now eight tons lighter and with new steel bolts highly resistant to corrosion reducing the risk of chemical reactions in the wood, Vasa is expected to last for many years to come.
Legacy of the Ship - Vasa:
Vasa has become a popular and widely recognized symbol for a historical narrative about the Swedish stormaktstiden ("the Great Power-period") in the 17th century, and about the early development of a European nation state.
Within the disciplines of history and maritime archaeology the wrecks of large warships from the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries have received particularly widespread attention as perceived symbols of a past greatness of the state of Sweden.
Among these wrecks, Vasa is the single best known example, and has also become recognized internationally, not least through a deliberate use of the ship as a symbol for marketing Sweden abroad.
The name Vasa has in Sweden become synonymous with sunken vessels that are considered to be of great historical importance, and these are usually described, explained and valued in relation to Vasa itself.
2015 Entry into the world´s top 10 attractions:
As the only Swedish entry, the Vasa Museum, in ninth place is listed onto the top 10 list of the world´s best museums.
b) The Vasa Museum:
A scaled down model with armament, masts at full sails alongside the preserved wooden ship the Vasa as the ship would have sailed from port on its doomed maiden voyage, listing to port in the top image.
The Transom:
"The High Transom provided space for a riot of colour and form. The sculptures delivered the message that the ship belonged to Gustaf II Adolf and that he was the rightful king of Sweden. Each sculpture proclaims the king's power majesty and glory. They also show that God was on the side of Sweden.
The sculptures were as important as the guns for the warship. Not everyone could read the symbolism in the classical figures, but most would recognise the Royal Coat of arms, knights and the Swedish national coat of arms, as well as cherubs and heroes of the bible."
(A transom is the flat surface forming the stern of a ship/boat or the horizontal beam reinforcing the stern of a boat).
One of the gun ports on the transom (aft) open and ready to fire at any enemy vessels.
A cross-section showing how the unsuspecting crew on the lower decks were hard at work when the Vasa began listing to port, trapping many of them and carrying them to their watery deaths.
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