Blog post #17: The Vasa - Simon Cousins: Travel Photography Portfolio, Framed Prints, Card Shop and Blog

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Blog post #17

7 January 2022

#17: The Vasa: the shortest maiden voyage in history?

A month before the mighty Swedish warship The Vasa cast off from Stockholm’s Royal Palace for its maiden voyage on Sunday 10 August 1628, a demonstration of the ship's stability was staged for Vice Admiral Klas Fleming; thirty men ran back and forth across the vessel’s upper deck in an effort to make the great ship roll. It was not long before the Vasa was heeling so alarmingly that it was feared it might capsize there and then at the quayside. The demonstration was abruptly halted. King Gustav II, who had commissioned the Vasa's construction, had been pressurising Vice Admiral Klas Fleming to put the ship to sea as soon as possible. Had the King been there to witness this, he might have relented, but he was with his army in Prussia and was not informed. The unease felt by those who had beheld the spectacle - especially Fleming - was hushed up and the launching of the Vasa went ahead as planned.

There was a carnival atmosphere that bright Sunday afternoon as onlookers from all walks of Stockholm society thronged the waterfront to see the Vasa set sail for the first time. The gleaming pride of the Swedish navy, built to claim victory against Catholic Poland and Lithuania in a bloody war of attrition, finally slipped its moorings to the cheers of exultant crowds on the quayside or those afloat in small craft in the harbour.

Within a few minutes however, a gust of wind filled the Vasa's sails and the giant vessel listed alarmingly to port. It recovered, but then another, stronger gust struck it as it passed the gap in the bluffs at Tegelviken. This time, it heeled violently to port, water poured in through the open gunports and, to the horror of everyone gathered together to watch its majestic departure, the Vasa began to sink.

Photo: 1:10 scale model of The Vasa on display at The Vasa Museum, with the salvaged vessel behind.

It took just five minutes for the Vasa to disappear below the waterline, while chaos reigned on board. It had sailed for a mere twenty minutes. Those on deck threw themselves into the water and were either picked up by the small craft that had followed the Vasa out or they swam the 120 metres to the shore of Beckholmen. Some of those on the lower decks were not so lucky. About 30 people died, including women and children; it was customary for families to join sailors on a maiden voyage.

Within another five minutes, the Vasa had sunk thirty two metres to the bottom of Stockholm harbour.

With the clothes still wet on his back, Captain Söfring Hansson, who had survived the disaster, was imprisoned and hauled before the Council of State. He insisted that his crew had been sober, that the guns had been properly lashed down and that the ship itself was unstable.

On 5 September, an inquest into the sinking of the Vasa was convened, chaired by Admiral of the Realm, Karl Karlsson Gyllenhielm (above), the King's half-brother.

It was held against a backdrop of grief for the lives lost, gratitude for those saved and a furious need to hold someone accountable.

The shipwright who had designed the Vasa, Dutch-born Henryk Hybertsson had died the year before. Before his death, he had handed responsibility for ship's construction to the builders Hein Jacobsson and Arendt de Groote. Under questioning, Jacobsson insisted that he had faithfully followed Hybertsson's design and that this had been approved by the King himself (above).

Obviously the King himself could not be blamed and in the absence of Hybertsson, the inquest found itself unable to indict anyone.

However, in the appendix to the inquest documents, a group of professional experts, captains and shipwrights recorded that the ship was poorly designed from the outset. Despite 120 tons of ballast in the keel, it did not have enough "belly" in the water ; the centre of gravity was simply too high, making the 172 ft tall Vasa fundamentally unstable. The deep concerns felt by those at the demonstration in July ultimately proved to be cruelly justified.

Unbelievably, all but three of its 64 bronze cannons were retrieved not long after the disaster, through the work of an English engineer Ian Bulmer, using 17th century diving bells. He was unable to salvage the Vasa itself however and, for 331 years, it remained where it had tragically come to rest.

It was not until the 1950's that credible efforts were made to bring the Vasa to the surface again. The ship had been discovered by Anders Franzen in 1956 when he retrieved cores of black oak from the vessel and between 1957 and 1959 navy divers dug six tunnels under the Vasa and pulled massive steel cables through them to suspend the ship in a basket.

The cables were fastened to two floating pontoons and over the next two years the Vasa was painstakingly raised from the bottom of the harbour.

On Monday, 24 April 1961, thousands of people crowded the shores around Kastellholmsviken, much as they had done almost 333 years earlier.

At 09.03, the tops of a few eroded frames crested the water. Soon, the carved heads of four warriors appeared, followed by the outline of the whole ship at last.

The Vasa had been miraculously preserved in the cold freshwater of Stockholm harbour. The water was also polluted, meaning that there had been no oxygen at the bottom to support bacteria, which could have eaten the ship.

Thousands of tons of mud and water had to be pumped out of the ship, before it could be transported to its own pontoon. This was where the arduous work of conserving the Vasa began, which included spraying it with polyethylene glycol for 17 years to prevent it drying out and disintegrating. Thousands of mild steel bolts were also inserted to hold the ship's structure together.

In 1988, the ship was moved to the newly-built Vasa Museum, built over an old Swedish navy dry dock. The Museum opened in 1990. Here you can see the Vasa's reconstructed masts on the museum roof, representing the actual height of the ship when she was fully rigged.

Your first encounter with the Vasa within the museum is truly breathtaking. Marvelled at by 25 million visitors so far, it can be viewed from six levels, where you can only gaze in wonder at its grandeur, its intricate ornamentation, its craftsmanship, the ambition of its creation and the astonishing conservation work that has preserved it all.

Wherever you visit in this beautiful city, make sure you don't miss the chance to step back in time and discover one of the most extraordinary museum exhibits in the world at the Vasamuseet, Stockholm.