Vasa

The Vessel

The Vasa was built in Stockholm between 1626 and 1628 for King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, then at the height of his military ambition in the Thirty Years' War. Her builder, Henrik Hybertsson, was a Dutch master shipwright working to a specification that changed through the build: the king had expanded her armament from a single to a double gun deck while she was already framed, and had ordered her lengthened to accommodate the extra weight.

At launch she was the most heavily armed warship in the world, carrying 64 bronze guns firing a broadside of 267 kilos. She was 69 metres long from beakhead to taffrail, 1,200 tons displacement, and ornamented with more than five hundred carved figures in oak and pine, gilded and painted in the style of the late Dutch Baroque. She was the visible argument for Swedish naval power at the moment Sweden was becoming a European great power.

She was also top-heavy. The double gun deck had been added above a hull designed for a single one; her ballast, 121 tons of stone, was insufficient to counter the weight of the upper guns and ornament. The navy's own captain, Söfring Hansson, had conducted a stability test before her voyage in which thirty men ran back and forth across her decks; she had rolled dangerously after three passes. The admiral overseeing the trial had stopped it before she rolled over and had written to the king with his concerns. The king was on campaign in Poland and did not reply.

The Voyage

She was to make her maiden voyage on 10 August 1628 from Stockholm's Skeppsgården to the naval base at Älvsnabben, about thirty nautical miles south, where she would take on the rest of her crew. The wind was light and southwest. Her captain had been instructed by the king to sail on a specific day for reasons the record does not preserve; the departure went ahead despite the stability trial's warning.

Four of her gun ports were opened for a ceremonial salute as she left the harbour. She moved under topsails, making perhaps two knots, past the crowds gathered on the waterfront to watch. The families of the crew had been allowed aboard for the first leg. The court, the diplomatic corps of half of Europe, and the king's enemies' informers watched her go.

A light gust of wind at about three in the afternoon, no more than a strong breeze by the standards of the Baltic, pushed her onto her starboard side. The open gun ports dipped below the waterline. She righted herself briefly, heeled again, and the second heel was terminal.

The Disaster

She capsized and sank 1,300 metres into her maiden voyage, in front of the city of Stockholm, in front of the foreign diplomatic corps, in front of the families of her crew. The water at her final position was 32 metres deep. Of the perhaps 150 aboard, approximately 30 drowned, most of them civilian family members who had been below decks when she rolled.

The inquiry that followed was constrained by the political sensitivity of the king's personal role in the design. The captain, Söfring Hansson, was arrested on the foredeck as the ship settled. His examination before the Riksråd focused on whether the crew had behaved drunkenly at the saluting guns or whether the ballast had shifted. He testified that the ballast had not moved, that the crew had been sober, that the stability had been tested and found wanting, and that the responsibility lay with the specification and not with his handling. The Riksråd accepted this and released him. No one else was ever charged.

The admiralty commissioned a salvage expedition within weeks. Fifty of her guns were recovered between 1664 and 1665 by divers working from a bell. The rest of the wreck was considered unrecoverable and forgotten. She lay in the anaerobic Baltic mud for three hundred and thirty-three years, colonised by anaerobic bacteria that do not digest ship timbers; the teredo navalis worm that consumes wooden wrecks in warmer waters cannot survive the Baltic's low salinity.

The Legacy

The marine engineer Anders Franzén located her in 1956 after a five-year search using a core-sampling technique he had invented for the purpose. He had reasoned that a ship lost in Baltic waters at her position on his charts would be preserved. The Swedish Navy began salvage planning in 1957 under the direction of the archaeologist Per Edvin Fälting.

On 24 April 1961 she was lifted from the seabed in one of the most technically audacious recoveries ever attempted. Six cables had been passed under her hull over two years of diving work; the lift was made in six increments, each bringing her a few metres closer to the surface, with fresh wooden patches set in as she rose. She broke surface at 09:03 after three hours of lifting, still intact. She was floated into a dry dock in Stockholm and has been on public display since.

She is the best-preserved seventeenth-century ship in the world, recovered at 95 percent completeness, with her original oak still bearing the tool marks of her builders. Her carved ornament, her anchors, her cannon, her crew's personal possessions (a single gold ring, a barber's medical kit, a set of backgammon pieces carved from whalebone) make her a more complete inventory of a Baltic Baroque warship than exists for any other vessel.

The Vasa Museum opened in 1990 on Djurgården and is the most-visited museum in Scandinavia, with 1.5 million annual visitors. She has taught underwater archaeology more about seventeenth-century shipbuilding than all land-based research combined; every book on Baltic naval architecture written since 1961 draws from her.

The ship that was meant to project Swedish power across Europe has instead taught the rest of Europe how Swedes of the 1620s built their ships. 1,300 metres into her maiden voyage has become the shorthand in naval architecture for the consequences of specification creep driven by royal will.