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]]>Vasa is an example of a wreck that was raised first and excavated after. A team led by Per Lundström consisting of ten archaeologists, a photographer and an artist, were charged with the task. Working conditions were exceptionally harsh. The ship had to be sprayed constantly with cold, fresh water to keep it from drying out, meaning that the team had to work in an invariably wet environment. Garden hoses and spray nozzles were used to wash away the black mud covering Vasa’s decks. What was revealed was an astonishing assemblage of artefacts still lying in place.
On both gundecks, the gun carriages stood at their gun ports and the belongings of sailors were still stored in chests toward the bow. In the hold, hundreds of cannonballs were found, but also barrels of salted meat – over time reduced to bones – and huge coils of anchor cable. In the cabins, pewter plates, hunting rifles and a gilt brass table clock were found, the belongings of the officers. Perhaps the most remarkable find were the carefully folded remains of six of Vasa’s sails plus the sails for the longboat, still tied up as they had been delivered from the sailmaker in 1627. The archaeologists registered each artefact, recorded its find place and gave it a unique find number after which the object was placed in water-filled tanks to await conservation.
However, diving work also continued at the site where Vasa sunk. Many pieces of the ship had fallen off the vessel and lay around it. From 1963 to 1967 divers surveyed the site and recovered the collapsed beakhead, the upper sterncastle, parts of the foremast and mainmast, many sculptures, the ship’s anchors and the longboat, a large vessel in itself measuring 12 m long, which had another smaller boat inside it. By the time the excavation of Vasa and the diving on the site of her sinking was complete, over 40 000 objects had been registered, including almost all of the parts of the ship needed to reconstruct Vasa more or less completely, and to tell the story of the people who made up the crew.
The discovery, raising and excavation of Vasa was one of the key developments in the theory and practice of the – at that point in time – new field of maritime archaeology, primarily in Sweden, but also internationally. Together with other significant finds from the 1950s and 1960s, such as the excavation of the remains of five Viking ships found in Roskilde Fjord, Denmark, under Olaf Olsen and Ole Crumlin-Pedersen, the medieval cog discovered in the River Weser at Bremen in Germany and, on the other side of the world, the wreck of the VOC ship Batavia in Western Australia, the work on Vasa demonstrated the potential of this growing corpus of ‘underwater’ archaeological finds to produce meaningful and significant insights into our past.
The research on the history and archaeology of Vasa and the 40 000 objects found with the ship is ongoing and tackles a wide range of topics including social, environmental, economic, political and technological issues affecting the northern European world of the first half of the 17th century. Doing this are a team of international researchers and students from – next to the conventional fields of history and archaeology – disciplines such as genetics, ballistics, metallurgy, zoology and economics. Recent projects have focused on the test firing of a replica of one of the ship’s 24-pounder bonze cannon, DNA analysis of the human remains found on the ship and inquiries into the role of woman in the Swedish economy. The research on Vasa is not just the analysis of a particular ship and how it sank, but has demonstrated to have the potential to contribute to wider technological and socio-economic questions, ranging from how the ship was built and sailed to the role of Sweden in the Thirty Years War (1618-1648).
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]]>Today, it is hard to imagine, but during the 17th and 18th centuries, the Kingdom of Sweden was an aggressive entity – one of the great European powers – that asserted territorial control over much of the Baltic region. When Gustav II Adolf (1594-1632) acceded the Swedish throne in 1611 he inherited wars with Russia, Denmark and Poland. Gustav Adolf was the grandson of Gustav I – or Gustav Vasa as he is widely known today – the first of the Vasa dynasty. The Vasa family had a bundle of sticks, called a fascine in English and ‘vase’ in Swedish, as their heraldic symbol and it is from this that the ship Vasa gets her name.
It is in these war-like conditions that Vasa was built. In fact, out of the 21 years Gustav Adolf reigned, 18 were spent at war. The ship was commissioned in January 1625, together with three others. It was a Dutch master shipwright, Henrik Hybertsson and his business partner Arendt de Groote, who secured the contract. Vasa’s keel was laid late in the winter of 1626 at Skeppsgården, the navy yard in Stockholm. By the summer, Hybertsson, who was already sick when construction started, had to hand over supervision of the works to his assistant, Hein Jakobsson. Hybertsson, who had designed Vasa, passed away soon after.
The ship was launched in the spring of 1627 and hundreds of craftsmen worked around the clock to finish it by the summer of 1628. Although vividly decorated with hundreds of sculptures, there can be no mistake that Vasa was a war machine. The ship was 69 m long, 50 m tall from the keel to the top of the main mast, weighed over 1200 tonnes when outfitted with all ten of her sails and carried 120 tonnes of ballast. Most importantly, Vasa carried 64 cannon: 48 24-pounders that fired shot weighing ten kilograms each; eight 3-pounders on the upper deck and six stormstycken, short guns for firing anti-personnel ammunition at short range. All of that firepower added up to a broadside of 250 kilograms, twice as much as the largest ships in other northern European navies at that time.
Before the ship set sail, it was tested. The captain supervising the rigging of Vasa, Söfring Hansson, had thirty men run back and forth across the deck and noted that the ship rolled alarmingly. Despite reporting his worries to Vice Admiral Klas Fleming, who himself was feeling the pressure from the king to get the ship to sea, Söfring received orders to set sail anyway. On the 10th of August 1628, Vasa did set sail… for 1300 metres. Thousands of Stockholm citizens and several foreign ambassadors watched while a gust of wind made the ship heel to port. Water gushed through the open gun-ports and within minutes Vasa was gone, lying 32 meters below on the sea bed.
Repeated attempts to raise the ship failed. However, 35 years later, in 1663, the divers Albrecht von Treileben and Andreas Peckell, making use of a recently perfected invention, the diving bell, managed to reach the ship, rip up the deck and extract almost all of Vasa’s guns and sold them abroad.
It was Anders Franzén who, in recent history, rediscovered the vessel in August of 1956. Divers explored the wreck and, thanks to the Baltic’s cold and fresh water which makes it inhospitable for shipworms, encountered Vasa in astonishing condition. When it was decided to lift the ship, the proposals on how to do so ranged from filling Vasa with ping-pong balls to freezing it in a giant ice-cube. Eventually, the Neptune Company opted to use a tried-and-tested method: divers spent two years digging tunnels and passing cables under the hull up to floating pontoons. On Monday the 24th of April 1961, Vasa was again seen by a crowd of thousands when the ship broke the surface 333 years after its fatal first voyage.
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