Monday, 31 May 2004

Stockholm, Sweden: In 1625, in the middle of the Thirty Years War, Sweden's King Gustav II Adolf ordered his shipyards to build the Vasa. A warship fiercer than any that had ever sailed the Baltic, the Vasa was to be the pride of the Swedish navy; she was Sweden's first attempt to build a ship with two full decks of cannon, and during construction the King decreed that the cannons would be of a heavier caliber than the original design.

The King's orders were carried out to the letter, of course, and three years later the Vasa was completed to his exact royal requirements. (In other circumstances a bold engineer might have whispered something in the King's ear about the laws of physics, but His Majesty was in Poland prosecuting the war at the time, which made communication difficult.) And so the mighty Vasa sailed into history… as the most ridiculously top-heavy ship ever constructed. She had all the balance of a bicyclist carrying an anvil, and her maiden voyage lasted about an hour before the inevitable happened: The ordinary rocking of ocean waves was enough to capsize the Vasa, and the pride of the Swedish navy promptly sank to a watery grave.

Now, when a wooden ship sinks it usually provides an excellent meal for the shipworm, a saltwater creature that feasts on timber—but the Baltic Sea is not very salty, and so the shipworm doesn't live there. The ship's hull remained intact, sitting peacefully on the ocean floor… but 17th century technology wasn't up to the challenge of raising it. Swedish divers in primitive diving bells did manage to recover the ship's cannons, but that was the most they could achieve; sometime after their exploits in the mid 1660s, the ship's location was lost to history.

The Vasa then sat undisturbed for almost 300 years, until some enterprising Swede with a homemade core sampler went looking for her. In 1956 Anders Franzén found the ship, and five years later the Swedish government carefully floated her to the surface, pumped out all the mud and sea water, and towed her into a museum. Among the wreckage the Swedes found everything from personal effects to the ship's sails, still neatly folded in their storerooms; the ship yielded up a treasure trove of historical artifacts, although it held no actual treasure—save for one gold ring, believed to be the admiral's.

Thus the Vasa became the only actual 17th century sailing ship to survive into the 21st, and a major tourist attraction for Stockholm. The specially constructed museum keeps the ship in constant temperature, high humidity—and low light, which makes photography a challenge. The ship is too big to illuminate with a flash, so I turned it off and took blurry photos; thanks to the digital camera I took 200 blurry photos, some of which (shown here) were less blurry than others.

Posted on November 20th. I'm trying to catch up to the present here, as you can see, but it's also my first week back in the office, my first week to play with the new computer, and lots of other busy stuff.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 1:55 am. comments.