Sweden: Stockholm – The Vasa Museum

The Vasa Museum is dedicated to the Vasa an almost fully intact 17th-century 64-gun warship that sank on her maiden voyage in 1628. When you enter the space seeing the Vasa is awe-inspiring. The story of the Vasa is as much about her salvaging, which was the first of its kind, as it is about the ship itself.

Gustav II Adolf (1594-1632) was the son of King Karl IX and Kristina of Holstein-Gottorp. His grandfather was Gustav I, or Gustav Vasa as he is often called today, the first of the Vasa dynasty. When Gustav Adolf acceded to the throne in 1611, he inherited three wars: with Russia, Denmark, and Poland-Lithuania. The situation was difficult, to say the least. Gustav Adolf was at war during 18 of the 21 years of his reign. In January 1625, Gustav Adolf signed a contract with the Dutch master shipwright Henrik Hybertsson and his business partner, Arendt de Groote. They were to build four new ships. One of them, Vasa, is to be the most powerful warship in the Baltic, if not the world.

When completed, the Vasa was 69 metres long and more than 50 metres tall from the keel to the top of the main mast. It weighed over 1200 tonnes once outfitted with ten sails, 64 cannons, 120 tonnes of ballast and hundreds of sculptures. On the 10th of August 1611, the Vasa set sail on its maiden voyage. Hundreds of people had gathered to watch this impressive boat leave the harbour, but unfortunately, it got no more than 1300 metres from the dock when a light breeze caused it to keel, and water rushed in through the open gun ports. Within 10 minutes the Vasa had sunk in 32 metres of water in Stockholm’s harbour. There were hundreds of people on the Vasa, but most managed to escape despite the ship sinking so quickly. Thirty-two people lost their lives.

Attempts to raise the ship at the time failed, but they did manage to salvage 60 of the 64 cannons.

There were lots of recriminations after the event and scapegoats were sought. The most obvious target was the shipbuilder, but he’d died before the building was complete. Eventually, the trail led back to the King’s instructions on the design, and no one wanted to confront the elephant in the room – so in the end no one was punished.
The ship was essentially unstable. It was too narrow for its height and no amount of ballast was going to stop it heeling even in the gentlest of winds. The Vasa was doomed before it even left the shipyard.

Anders Franzén was a Swedish marine technician and an amateur naval archaeologist. He believed he knew where the Vasa was located. After years of trawling over 17th century records and searching waters around Stockholm in August 1956, he found evidence of a sunken ship, which he believed to be the Vasa. This started a mission to raise her from the mud of the harbour. Work began in 1959 and in April 1961, after 333 years of being submerged the Vasa was finally raised.

The Vasa has been held together with metal bolts that had all rusted away and had to be replaced initially with wooden pegs. To preserve the Vasa was going to be a painstaking and lengthy task. In 1962 the preservation work started by spraying with a water-soluble wax, polyethylene glycol or PEG. The treatment lasts for 17 years. Thousands of mild steel bolts are inserted to hold the structure together. The upper parts of the ship are reconstructed. In 1979, the sprays were stopped completely. The ship gradually dries over the following years, as the air humidity is decreased from around 95 to 60%. The surface of the wood is treated with an extra layer of PEG for physical protection. In 1988, the ship was moved to the newly built Vasa Museum.

As I was saying, the Vasa itself is the undoubted highlight of the museum, but on five levels around the outside of the Vasa are other exhibits of carved wooden statues to exemplify what those on the Vasa would have looked like, artefacts retrieved from the Vasa and displays that spoke of the life and times of sailors in the period. It is a fantastic museum.