Hot Fossils and Rebel Matters 218 – The Warship that Wasn’t

I’ve been away now for quite a few months, and I am sorry for that.  Life has been busy.  But today I am back with some more soundscene audio, this time from our travels in Scandinavia last spring.

As Molly Oldfield says in her new book The Secret Museum, “As a work of art, it is a masterpiece, but as a warship it was a disaster.  You can see the entire distance it ever sailed from the roof of the museum.”

She is talking about the 17^th century Swedish warship, the Vasa.  In 1628 it sank  just 1300 meters into it’s maiden voyage.    The king at the time, Gustavus Adolphus, effectively overrode his designers, engineers and expert shipbuilders to have them construct a battleship that was dangerously unseaworthy.   The cannons put in the gun ports may have been too heavy than was usual for that type of ship.  The ship was ultimately weighted with insufficient ballast.  Ballast is used to ensure that a ship can stay steady, counteract the wind and momentum of the ship and otherwise keep it upright.  Sometimes ballast can be the weight of the crew and passengers. Sometimes it is objects. Sometimes it is a characteristic of the way a ship is constructed.   In the case of the Vasa, it was built top heavy with no counteracting design.  Or perhaps the boat was simply too big to support the king’s intent against the Polish that his men were sailing to fight.   With all this, it is a magnificent construction.  Here’s  Vasa by the numbers:  It is estimated to be about 69 metres long.   That’s 226 feet or 75 yards.  The width of the ship is 11.7 metres or 38 feet.   The height is roughly 52.5 metres or 57 yards.  It originally had ten sails of which six, in various states of disrepair, survive.   It held 64 bronze cannon.   Well over 26,000 artifacts of all kinds were also found.   It is adorned with over 500 sculptures, designs and enormously detailed reliefs that must have been spectacular in their original colors.   Those colors have been washed away by centuries in the clay bottom and currents of the harbour waters.

The technology that made it possible for the Vasa to be raised did not exist until the 20^th century.   It was confirmed to be 32 meters down in August 1956.    In the words published on the Vasa Museum website, we know that:

“The [Swedish] navy’s heavy divers were able to cut six tunnels through the clay under the ship with special water jets. Steel cables were drawn through the tunnels and taken to two lifting pontoons on the surface, which would pull the ship free of the harbour bottom’s grip. In August 1959, it was time for the first lift. There was great uncertainty – would the old wooden ship hold together?  Yes! Vasa held. She was lifted in 18 stages to shallower water, where she could be patched and reinforced in preparation for the final lift, to the surface…At 9:03 AM on the 24th of April, 1961, Vasa returned to the surface.”

In order to preserve the wood, the Vasa was sprayed with polyethylene glycol, a chemical compound that replaces the water in the wood.  This was to prevent shrinkage and cracking.   This process took an astounding 17 years.  The ship had to be kept purposely wet in order that it not dry out and crack.   More than 90% of the ship was recovered intact.

Archaeologists think that 150 people were on board, mostly mariners, and no soldiers, (300 were to board the ship eventually).   When the ship sank, about 30 died.   The skeletons of about 16 persons were found in and around the ship.   The skeleton exhibit seemed to be the busiest with dozens of children gathered around the glass cases containing them.  The museum curators have given names to the skeletons, tried to reconstruct what they may have looked like, and created stories about what their lives may have been like aboard the boat and off.

Now that you have the background, sit back and enjoy this soundscene of our visit to this amazing one of a kind museum:

Download instead HotFRM 218 (36mb 18m47s)

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