Friday, August 10

     Welcome to the Wannaskan Almanac for Friday.

     On this day in 1628, the Swedish warship Vasa sank in Stockholm harbor on her maiden voyage. There were 133 sailors aboard along with bureaucrats and politicians, wives and children. About fifty people drowned. The rest were rescued by pleasure boats following the new ship.
     The Vasa was 165 feet long, 40 feet wide, and 180 feet from her keel to the top of the mainmast. These dimensions spelled disaster to anyone who knew ships. But King Gustavus Adolphus approved these measurements. Everyone from the builder to the captain tried to tell someone above them that disaster loomed for the Vasa, but no one dared tell the king who had approved the plans and had even added a second deck of cannons which further destabilized the ship.
    It was not windy the day the Vasa went down, but a puff of wind caught the sails about a mile from her starting point. The ship heeled over. Water poured in through the open gun ports and down she went, settling upright on the bottom with her mainmast sticking out of the water.
     The captain was arrested along with all the ship's officers, as well as the builder and the designer. The designer had conveniently died the previous year. An inquiry was held to assess blame and administer punishment. All testimony led to the king who had wanted the ship "just so." In the end, no one was punished.
     Many oxen were hitched to a line tied to the mast to try to raise the ship but it just sank deeper into the Baltic mud. A salvage crew using a diving bell brought up fifty of the ship's sixty-four cannons. Eventually the Vasa was forgotten as all national embarrassments are.
     In the 1920s, a historian researching another sunken ship came across records of the Vasa inquiry. A young boy named Anders Franzen, who lived close to where the Vasa went down, became obsessed with finding her. He learned to read old Swedish script and began searching the records himself to pinpoint the spot where the Vasa sank. After WWII, he began spending his weekends in a small motorboat trolling the area where he thought the ship might be using with a grappling hook and a tube to take samples.
    Finally, in 1956, Franzen found what he thought was the Vasa. He notified the navy which sent a diver to investigate. Yes, it was indeed the Vasa. After five years of salvage work, the Vasa rose above the waves of Stockholm harbor. She was towed to a temporary shelter where she could be kept wet to prevent drying and cracking. In 1990 the new Vasa Museum opened. Teresa, her brother Pete, her dad, and I visited the Vasa in 2004. We had come to Sweden to visit relatives, but seeing the Vasa was at the top of my list of things to see. We weren't disappointed.
     You can see the ship on six levels, from the keel to the top of the stern castle. The museum has displays of the belongings of the crew, from shoes and coats to pipes and backgammon sets. There are models of the ship showing what she looked like in 1628 and displays of the sinking. And of course there's a video in your favorite language to make sense of it all.
     The Vasa, once forgotten as an embarrassment, is now a valued reminder of Sweden's "Great Power Days." King Gustavus, by the way, was leading his army in Poland (Thirty Years' War was going on) when he received news of the sinking. His reaction has not been recorded. He was killed four years later while leading a cavalry charge at the Battle of Lützen. He was 37 years old.

A 1:10 model of the Vasa, beside the original.