The great prize of a maritime museum is a historic ship or a replica, but most maritime museums must settle for a figurehead or a cannon and some ship models. Not the Vasa Museum in Stockholm, Sweden, opened in 1990. Here, one of the newest maritime museums in the world houses one of the oldest vessels in the world. One thought to be the mightiest, at that, and sunk in the mud for 333 years!
Even from the outside, its mainmast bursting from the roof of the museum, the Vasa is unlike anything you have ever imagined. She is hardly a sleek sailing ship but a magnificent warship, built in Stockholm by Dutch shipbuilding masters for the empire-aspiring Gustavus II Adolphus, called the Lion of the North, in the early 17th century -- a time when ship ornamentation had reached its acme and when Sweden was still a sparsely populated and little known nation with large dreams.
Ultimately, the Vasa was an emblem of power and its twin, glory. Such is the nature of power and glory that it is ephemeral. Yet here, at the edge of Stockholm, where the Vasa Museum sits, the resurrected ship looks out at a startlingly beautiful city, a realized dream, and Gustavus Adolphus’ Vasa is a piece of it.
The Vasa in its time
When ships of state or of entrepreneurial grandeur, mighty and proud, founder on the seas without a trace of combat, there is usually an element of hubris, or arrogance, behind the event. Such was the case with the Titanic in 1912, whose captain bent to the will of the chairman of the White Star Line to leave early and set a record transatlantic crossing time. Unfortunately, it caused the Titanic to make its departure without the binoculars that would have permitted an early sighting of the iceberg that doomed the then largest ship and largest moving object ever built.
Nearly three hundred years earlier, on August 10, 1628, the Vasa, an unspeakably beautiful royal Swedish vessel -- with 64 bronze guns weighing over 81 tons and more than a thousand sculptures plus an ornamented stern of carved and painted wood figures towering fifty feet above the water – was a victim of hubris as well, and she went down in a sudden, unexpected, violent gust of wind.
Horrified hundreds on the shores watched as the wind filled the small and large topsails, the foresail, and the spanker sail, which had been set against a gentle breeze. The ship listed just enough to dip the portside gun-openings into the water. The ship’s maiden voyage, then, comprised just 4,265 feet before she took on water and sank immediately, drowning 50 of the 150 on board, including wives and children who had been invited to sail to a naval base in the archipelago where 300 soldiers were to board.
Who was at fault? The King, then in Prussia, assumed “imprudence and negligence,” and asked that the guilty be punished. The Danish-born captain swore, and the interrogation records survive to this day, “before God Almighty, no one on board was intoxicated,” and he said, “You can cut me in a thousand pieces if all the guns were not secured.” History and salvage have proved him an honest man. The fault lay in the great and beautiful warship itself, too large and too strong, with a center of gravity too high in order to accommodate more gundecks, as per the request of King Gustavus Adolphus.
The shipbuilder had complied, of course, with the king’s request for more and more guns, and since many 17th century vessels were very tall and unstable, it was not clear just how top-heavy and unstable the Vasa was. Master builders in the 17th century counted on “dead reckoning” and experience rather than drawings.
The admiral also bore blame since he had observed the stabilizing test where thirty men were instructed by the shipmaster to run back and forth across the Vasa’s deck and had noted well that they had to stop after three runs, or the Vasa would have capsized. He had the power to stop the ship’s departure, but then, the King was in Prussia, waiting for the ship – impatiently.
No one, in the end, was punished. How do you punish hubris?
Salvaging the Vasa
In the 17th century, all salvage attempts had failed until 1665, when men in diving bells in pitch black, frigid waters were able to loosen 50 guns, drag them through the gun ports, and bring them to the surface. After that, the Vasa remained untouched until August 25, 1956.
It was Anders Franzén --, a persistent engineer, an expert on wrecked naval vessels, and an amateur marine archaeologist who had been dragging and sounding in the Stockholm harbor since 1953 and finding, he said, “ladies’ bicycles, Christmas trees, iron cooking pots, and dead cats” -- who brought up a piece of blackened oak on his home-made core sampler. A diver went down to confirm what Franzen thought was the Vasa and reported from a crackling diver’s telephone that he couldn’t see anything in the dark water but “I can feel something big – the side of a ship. Here’s one gun port…and here’s another!”
These proved to be part of the Vasa, standing almost intact, on the seabed. One proposal to bring the ship up advised filling her with ping-pong balls until she rose to the surface of her own accord. Another offered to freeze the Vasa into an immense block of ice and let her float to the surface and tow her to a place where the ice would melt in the sun.
It was an experienced Swedish salvage company that was finally chosen. They would use the conventional technique of laying heavy cables attached to water-filled pontoons under the hull, pumping out the water so the pontoons would rise, stretching the cables, and lifting the Vasa from the seabed. The Swedish company agreed to carry out the work free of charge, while foundations, companies, individuals, and the Swedish Navy all contributed.
In the next five years, divers worked to dig tunnels under the ship. Thick steel cables were drawn beneath her and she was raised in 16 stages. Eleven years after locating her, the Vasa was finally towed to dry dock on April 24, 1961 and 29 years after that, on June 15, 1990, King Carl XVI Gustaf opened the permanent museum.
Consider these items. One thousand oaks were felled to make the Vasa, and when she was brought to the surface, 14,000 individual pieces of wood came with her, like a gargantuan jigsaw puzzle. Paint remains could be analyzed for color, and food remains were intact. The preservation of the hull of the ship took over twenty years. The lower rigging was reconstructed in the 90s, aided by the discovery of original sails found on board and some of the original rigging. Carpenters produced the missing parts and re-erected the Vasa’s masts, while apprentices made stays and shrouds to stabilize the masts forward, to the sides, and to the stern, and re-erected the rigging in 1995.
An Extraordinary Museum
No one told me that I would spend five hours in the Vasa Museum, but like the American next to me who had last seen the Vasa under plastic, sprayed with polyethylene glycol every 20 minutes, in 1969, I couldn’t leave…
The moist and darkened museum, with its uplights and downlights dramatizing the vast ship, is as close as you can get to the experience of the Vasa. Although the visitor cannot actually board the ship, it is just beyond the fingertips, at seven different levels, with the sound of wind and waves, and an undertone of the voices of the crew. On the high-ceiling and low-ceiling levels, nine special exhibits replicate and explain, in both Swedish and English, and give fullness to life aboard a warship in the 1600s.
The bottom level, below ground, is hull level, with a workshop on the side. The visitor stands in sawdust, cheek by jowl with carved wood replicas of the boatmen, the lowliest of workers. As you go up the levels, even the trek (unless you use the elevators) reminds of the rigors of being aboard.
On the level of the stern, there is the magnificent restored ornamentation and the original carved figures leaning seductively towards the observer. Replicas hang from the walls behind, next to small piles of the powdered pigments reconstructed from microscopic paint fragments and now used in restoration. Peruse these, from cinnabar and yellow ochre to malachite, from indigo to hematite. There are Roman warriors, friendly mermaids, and Greek gods. And the powerful lion leaping forward? It is the emblem of Gustavus Adolphus, Lion of the North, so well recognized that there was no need to put the name on this ship.
Read the abundant explanations and learn that there were only two latrines in the bulkhead for the crew of 300. Learn the heady punishments, imaginative and often deadly, to which the crew was subjected for disobedience. See the bronzeware, pewter, faience, and hexagonal wine glasses of the officers, who sat at tables with candlesticks in the captain’s cabin, and compare that to the wooden bowls and spoons of the crew. Seven men ate from the same bowl, in the semi-darkness, next to the guns.
From the kitchen at the bottom of the ship (with no chimney) came cooking pots, butter casks – two with 333-year-old butter – and barley groats, dried peas and beans, dried and salt fish, dried beef, and dried pork. Crew chests show sewing implements to repair the single set of a seaman’s clothes. There was no uniform, shoes and gloves were made by the seaman himself, and the weather at sea was brutal.
There are replicas of the Vasa’s interior spaces and a gun deck with cannon and cannonballs. There are carved models of the Vasa, medical equipment, board games, a film on naval warfare and on navigation in the 1600s, and a new exhibit on the findings from the skeletal remains of the Vasa’s crew with a sound track of fragments of the speech of the time and a reconstruction of facial features based on the crania. Alongside the Vasa is a complete boat salvaged with the Vasa and exhibited on her port side. There are computer adventures, a children’s reading corner, a worthy gift shop, a restaurant, and a summer terrace.
One marvelous exhibit displays the original sails and rigging of the Vasa, the oldest sails in the world! Observe these from inches away with full explication of mizzenmasts and mainmasts and how the sails were furled and unfurled. “Vinden är god – gör seglen lösa!” The wind is fair, goes the order. Loosen the sails.
And you can photograph it all.
For want of a nail… or the Vasa’s New Battle
The Vasa, originally built in the Royal Dockyard in Stockholm, now stands in a museum built atop a 19th century drydock in the harbor. You can look out the windows and see where she was built and the spot where she sank. To all appearances, the Vasa today is both safe and well, but appearances can be deceptive.
Amazingly, the longtime “home port” of the Vasa – that is, the mud, for 333 years -- was hospitable. Because the Baltic Sea has brackish water, it totally deterred sea worms, and since water at the depth of the Vasa does not contain oxygen, the vessel was neither eaten nor decomposed. She was, in fact, in excellent condition, and her structural problems began only after she was raised.
Though the visitor to the museum would never detect it, the Vasa is currently fighting a new battle, this time against sulfur, acid, salt, and iron. From her salvage until 1990, the Vasa was temporarily housed in a basic aluminum building – a building which slowly rusted from the 98% humidity of the continuous water spray used to prevent the Vasa’s timbers from disintegrating.
There are currently five research teams working, at a cost of eight million Swedish kronor, on a long-term solution to the Vasa’s sulphur problems and at halting the breakdown of the ship’s timber. They need to understand what promotes the formation of sulphuric acid, what methods can be safely used to remove it and prevent more from forming, whether or not there are bacteria on the Vasa that are influencing the breakdown, how the iron can be removed, and how the breakdown process is affected by the preservative agent in the Vasa.
By July 2003, the Vasa had 1,500 areas of acified wood and visible sulfate deposits. The Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory in California analyzed core samples and estimates that the wood carries about two tons of sulphuric acid now and will generate about five more tons as the sulphur oxidizes.
The oxidation catalyst is likely to be the iron compound deposits in the wood that give the oak its dark color and come from the Vasa’s original meter-long iron bolts which rusted away long, long ago. Curiously, when 5,500 new iron bolts were fitted, these probably corroded quickly from contact with the polyethylene glycol used as a preservative in the moist wood.
There are the Challenger’s O-rings, the Titanic’s rivets, and the Vasa’s iron bolts. While it would be a good idea to replace the 5,500 iron bolts in the Vasa with bolts of inert material, the catch-22 is that most of them cannot be removed without damaging the wood. Some of the bolts are in inaccessible places, but mostly, when the hull shrank and subsided during the drying process, many of the bolts became squeezed and bent.
Even as you read this, the Vasa is undergoing an emergency short-term measure to neutralize the ship’s extensive acid: bicarbonate and soda treatment of its timbers. And if you visit in the summer, know that since variations in climate affect the rate of acid formation, even the increased air-conditioning required to deal with summer humidity and the high number of summer visitors means dangerous fluctuation.
Also arming for the fight to save this national treasure are the people of Sweden, working through their bread-baking tradition itself. Wasa Husman has been baking one of Sweden’s favorite crispbreads since 1933, and now, in its Wasa Aids the Vasa campaign, the company is donating 50 öre from each package of Wasa sold to the “Preserve the Vasa” Charitable Foundation.
Stockholm is a watery place, almost defined by water -- a city built on 14 islands, from which the archipelago begins, with its 24,000 islands. Today, there are memorable boat tours on Lake Mälaren and through the archipelago on a Viking replica, on a turn-of-the-century boat, or on a modern craft. Here, old rustic boats are preserved and used everywhere. And the number of sailboats, even on a rainy day, skimming the waterways that wind around Stockholm remind the visitor that these were and still are Vikings! The Vasa is as sure a piece of Sweden’s history as you will find.
You can make a high quality model of the Vasa, with a double-planked hull and metal castings, or you can buy her already and precisely handcrafted. But nothing, absolutely nothing can compare to a visit to the Vasa on the waterway in her dimly but dramatically lit museet, her masts breaking through the ceiling and reaching thrillingly heavenward in an urge, a thrust to a glorious destiny on the seas. In a sense, the Vasa lives and thrives more than she did in her own time, and we can almost hear poet Robert Browning asserting that “a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” But this doomed ship, like the Titanic and the spaceship Challenger which followed, speaks to something inside us that has to be reminded that we must mark the difference between man’s reach and vaulting over-reach.
