The Vasa story

This magnificent early 17th century Swedish warship was raised in 1959, after 333 years on the seabed.

It is now spectacularly displayed in the Vasa Museum at Stockholm. Visitors entering the ship hall are astounded to see Vasa, transporting them back 400 years to an era when Sweden was the dominant power in the Baltic.

KING AND EMPIRE

King Gustav II Adolf (1594-1632) was the grandson of Gustav I, or Gustav Vasa, the first of the Vasa dynasty. Gustav II’s daughter Queen Kristina was the last of the Vasa dynasty to sit on the Swedish throne. The Vasa family originally had a bundle of sticks, called a vase in Swedish, as their heraldic symbol, and it is from this that the ship got her name. By the 17th century, the vase looked more like a sheaf of wheat, and Vasa’s stern carries a gilded sheaf between two cherubs as the ship’s name board. When Gustav Adolf came to the throne (aged 17) in 1611, he inherited three wars: with Russia, Denmark and Poland. The situation was difficult, to say the least. He was at war during 18 of the 21 years of his reign, both wars he inherited and wars he sought, including part of the Thirty Years’ War 1618-1648.

Gustav Adolf was in conflict with his first cousin Sigismund, the King of Poland, who had also been King of Sweden 1592-1599, but was deposed, partly because of his Catholic faith. He, and many others in Europe, thought that he was the rightful King of Sweden. Gustav Adolf’s wars in the name of Protestantism expanded Sweden’s borders – taking in Latvia, Estonia, Jamtland (from Norway) and parts of western Russia, and laid the foundations for Sweden as a great power.

His war with Poland was also in the interests of gaining a stake in, and taxes from, the bulk goods trade of Poland. He captured the Polish port of Riga and the territory of Livonia (roughly modern-day Latvia) in 1621.

BUILDING VASA¹

Gustav’s vision for Vasa was a splendid one. The ship was intended to symbolise the expansionist aspirations of Sweden and to glorify the King. Vasa would help maintain Sweden’s position as the dominant power in the Baltic.

In January 1625 Gustav commissioned the building of four ships, two large (with two gun decks and a keel length of 128ft and beam of 34ft) and two small.² The latter had one gun deck and a keel of 111 ft, but Gustav decided to increase the length to 120ft, a medium sized ship with two gun decks. He wanted all four ships to be of this length. However, the timber for the first large and the first small ship was by then already cut. The King had heard that the Danes were building a large ship with two gun decks and required all the new ships to follow suit. Heinrik Hybertsson, the Dutch master shipwright, refused to waste timber and proceeded to build the first large ship, albeit with a slightly shorter length as a compromise to meet the King’s requirement for a medium-sized ship. It took almost two years (1626-1628) to build and fit out Vasa. From dawn to dusk, carpenters, sawyers, smiths, ropelayers, sailmakers, painters, carvers, gun carriage makers and other specialists struggled to complete the navy’s great, new ship.

The King visited the shipyard to inspect the work. Vasa would indeed be magnificent, a hull built of more than a thousand oak trees with 64 cannon, masts over 50 metres high and hundreds of painted and gilded sculptures. The shipyard where Vasa was built was the navy yard of Skeppsgården, one of the largest workplaces in Sweden. The workforce was about half Swedish and Finnish, with the rest mostly from Holland. Timber from Swedish forests and rough sawn planks from Riga and Amsterdam were shipped to Stockholm to become ship’s timbers and planks. Iron and copper were mined in Sweden, while hemp for rope, sailcloth and paint were purchased from abroad. Native Swedish pine was used for the masts and spars. There were 5,000 iron bolts, some as long as 2 metres, and 30,000 wooden trenails. With just her lower masts stepped, the ship displaced 900 tons. Hybertsson was an experienced shipwright who managed the navy yard under a private contract from the state and followed Dutch shipbuilding practice. In this period, Dutch ships were not built from drawings. Instead the master shipwright was given the overall dimensions and used proportions and rules of thumb based on his own experience to produce a ship with good sailing qualities.³

Hybertsson became ill and died in the spring of 1627, so he never saw the ship completed. Responsibility for construction fell to his assistant, Hein Jakobsson in 1626. He had difficulty understanding and implementing the undocumented ideas of Hybertsson.

The carpenters who built Vasa came from Holland and Sweden and used measuring rules of different sizes. A Swedish foot had 12 inches and differed from a Dutch foot which had 11 inches and was 16mm shorter.⁴ Each construction team followed its own solutions for different problems. When the ship was salvaged six rulers were found, all of different lengths! This resulted in the ship being lop-sided (asymmetrical). It is now clear that the ship was built even more askew than previously believed, and that the gun ports on the port side are less well lined up than expected with those on the starboard side. A stability trial, during which thirty men ran from side to side three times, was witnessed by Vice-Admiral Klas Fleming, who had supervised the construction. It showed dangerous instability, but Fleming did not send word to the King, who had been pressing for the ship’s early completion because ten ships of the Swedish Navy had been lost in a storm near Riga, and two in the blockading squadron had been lost to the Poles (one sunk and one captured).

THE SHIP

While Vasa was being built, the tactics of sea battles were changing. Cannon might increasingly be used to sink a ship, but often the goal was to capture the enemy ship by boarding. Later in the 17th century, ships and cannon were coordinated in the line of battle: opposing fleets fired at each other in two lines. Vasa incorporated both of these approaches to fighting at sea. She had a large number of heavy cannon, whilst also being manned and equipped for hand-to-hand combat. The complete crew was about 450 men, of whom 300 were soldiers. The high aftercastle allowed men with muskets to shoot down into the decks of an enemy ship but contributed to the ship’s high centre of gravity. On the upper deck were guns called stormstycken (assault guns), which fired canisters of small shot and scrap metal as anti-personnel weapons.

She carried 64 bronze cannon:

• 24-pounder (48) (24 on each gundeck)
• 3-pounder (8)
• 1-pounder (2)
• Stormstycken (6)

Vasa was one of the earliest examples of a warship with two full gun decks. She was possibly the most powerful warship of her time because she mounted heavy guns on both decks, probably at the King’s insistence. He had originally specified 24-pdrs on both gundecks, but armament plans produced in 1626-27 show 12-pdrs on the upper gundeck, with 24-pdrs on the lower gundeck. This was a more realistic approach and was to become the standard arrangement in the Swedish navy and elsewhere, as a compromise between stability and firepower. By Spring 1628 this had reverted to the unitary armament.⁵ This and the proliferation of heavy oak carvings which the king required further raised the ship’s centre of gravity. The cost of the guns was greater than that of the ship herself.

MAIDEN VOYAGE AND SINKING

On Sunday,10 August 1628, Vasa lay rigged and ready for sea just below the royal palace Tre Kronor. Ballast, guns and ammunition were all on board, but she was due to take on more stores and personnel at her destination, the naval station at Alvsnabben, the summer base of the navy in the Stockholm archipelago. Her gun ports were open so that she could fire a salute. On the quays and shores along Strömmen, an excited public including most of Stockholm’s 10,000 citizens, waited to watch the ship leave the port and celebrate her departure. Also watching were a number of foreign ambassadors, in effect spies of Gustav’s allies and enemies. Over a hundred crewmen were on board Vasa, as well as about forty guests including women and children: some of the crew had permission to take family and guests along for the first part of the passage through the Archipelago to Vaxholm.

For the first few hundred metres Vasa was warped along the waterfront with cables from the shore. Once she was in the main channel sailors climbed the rigging to set four of Vasa’s ten sails. These were the topsails, foresail and mizzen, and there was a light south-westerly breeze.⁶ A salute was fired, and Vasa slowly began her maiden voyage. As she came out from under the lee of the harbour cliffs, the sails caught the wind, but the ship was tender and heeled over to port when a gust came, channelled through a gap in the cliffs on the south side of the harbour. Then she heeled again, even farther, on a second gust.⁷

Water rushed in through the open gun ports and the ship’s fate was decided. As the level increased on the lower gundeck it rose above the hatch coamings and poured into the hold. Vasa sank, after sailing for only twenty minutes and covering barely 1300 metres. The crew threw themselves into the water or clung to the rigging until rescued, but not all managed to save themselves. Eyewitnesses differ on the exact numbers, but perhaps 30 of approximately 150 people on board died in the loss. After the ship was raised in 1961, the remains of at least 16 people were found. Two weeks later the news of the sinking reached the Swedish King, who was in Prussia conducting a war campaign. He wrote to the Royal Council in Stockholm saying that the disaster had to be the result of ‘foolishness and incompetence,’ and the guilty must be punished. What exactly lay behind the loss could not be determined with certainty at the inquiry held in the palace. But the ship’s lack of stability was a fact: the underwater part of the hull was too small and the ballast insufficient in relation to the rig and cannon. The leaders of the inquiry believed that the ship was well built but incorrectly proportioned.

WHOSE FAULT WAS IT?

Vice Admiral Klas Fleming, the operational head of the navy, had been present before the ship sailed, when the Captain demonstrated how unstable the ship was. Men ran from side to side and on their third pass the ship was ready to capsize at the quay. The admiral was heard to say that he wished the King was there. There was no room for extra ballast, and in any case it would have brought the lower gun ports even nearer, or below, the waterline. King Gustav II Adolf had ordered a large ship with so many heavy calibre cannon, and approved the ship’s dimensions. The heavy sculptures added to the ship’s instability. He put pressure on the builders for early completion.

Master shipwright Henrik Hybertsson was a talented shipbuilder who had delivered several successful ships to the navy, but had too little experience with building ships with two gun decks. His death meant his assistant was left with a difficult task, with no documented plans. No one in Sweden had ever constructed a ship with two gun decks. Hein Jakobsson told the Council, ‘I built the ship according to the design given to me by Master Henrik and which the king had approved.’ The ship’s Captain, Söfring Hansson, told the inquiry: ‘You can chop me into a thousand pieces if all of those cannon weren’t secured. And before God Almighty I swear that nobody was drunk. It was simply a little gust of wind that made the ship capsize. The ship was too unstable, even though all the ballast was in.’ But Vasa’s sinking could be blamed on him. It would have been safer to sail the ship with the lower gun ports closed, since he knew the ship was unstable. If the inquiry was held today, the Captain would probably be held responsible. The lower gunports had a double lip, designed to seal. If they had been closed on the lee side the ship would not have sunk.

In the event no-one was officially blamed, and the inquiry explained the sinking as an act of God. This formulation avoided implicating the King, which it would otherwise be hard to do.⁸ But the reputation of Henrik Hybertsson, who was now dead, suffered most, and his family were pilloried. Hein Jakobsson clearly thought the contracted beam was too narrow, since he tried to widen Vasa – adding just 1’ 5” to her beam. For her sister ship Applet he added 5ft to the contracted beam, so that the ship was 3’ 7” wider than Vasa. This gave more space for ballast, and was enough, though after her first period of service the 24-pdrs on the upper gundeck were replaced by 12-pdrs, weighing 25% less. Applet had a long career.

The engineer and wreck researcher Anders Franzén looked for Vasa for several years. He went through the archives in search of information and dragged the sea bottom for physical remains. On 25 August 1956, he sat in a small motorboat with the diver Per Edvin Fälting, and his homemade coring device brought up a piece of blackened, waterlogged oak. Fälting dived to the bottom and confirmed the find – two rows of gunports meant that it had to be Vasa. Franzén succeeded in enlisting support for salvaging the ship, notably with the navy and the Neptune salvage firm. The stern of the ship gaped open, because of the recovery of many of the cannon by divers in 1664-5. ⁹

Vasa lay at a depth of 32 metres. The navy’s divers 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?

All of Sweden held its breath. Newspapers, radio and TV from all over the world were there. 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 24 April 1961, Vasa returned to the surface! A piece of the 17th century was suddenly back among us. Time stopped on Vasa at five o’clock in the afternoon on 28 August 1628. When the ship was salvaged 333 years later, the crew’s sea chests were still packed with provisions, clothing and personal mementoes.

LIFE ABOARD VASA

Skeletons of 13 men, two women and two cats were found. Modern forensic sculpting techniques have made it possible to give them faces based on the skulls, soft tissue thickness, and knowledge of age and health from their bones.

‘Helge’ was a seaman whose body was recovered by the archaeologists. His legs were trapped under a gun carriage on the port side of the lower gun deck, with his head against the side of the ship. He was still wearing his shoes and the remains of his jacket and trousers, with a few copper coins in his pocket. The port side was the one where the water first entered. Was he one of those ordered to haul in the guns and close the port lids? Was he scrambling across the tilted deck attempting to reach a ladder before sliding backwards and hitting his head on an oak beam?

Over 450 men should have shared the space inside Vasa if she had sailed on. Crowding on the warship was extreme. Six men shared the space between each pair of cannon, where they would live, eat and sleep. The officers had somewhat better conditions. The great cabin was decorated with sculptures on the walls, and they could sleep in fold-out beds instead of directly on the deck, and eat from tables.

The officers ate from pewter dishes and decorated and glazed earthenware. In the bottom of the ship, the cook prepared meals for the large crew over an open fire. Six to eight men ate with wooden spoons, from common wooden bowls, between the cannon, where they also slept and fought for their lives. Contemporary records report that each man received a little over three litres of beer each day.

The food was monotonous, but possibly better than what they would have had at home. When ships were on blockade duty on the Polish coast, the men might go for months without fresh food. Then there was only porridge, dried peas and beans, dried or salt fish, and salted beef or pork, which was boiled in a stew. Scurvy and other deficiency diseases became common. When in Sweden the crew had to supply their own food. Discipline on board was very strict. A man who started a fight could find himself pinned to the mainmast by a knife through his hand. Those who complained about the food were banished to the ship’s boats and fed on bread and water for several days. Anyone who caused a fire would himself be thrown into the fire. If a sailor was simply disrespectful to the Admiral, he could be keelhauled.¹⁰

Amongst the many artefacts on display are birch burl flasks, pewter chamber pots, china and glazed earthenware dishes, copper coins, like those found in Helge’s pocket, a primitive sundial, a backgammon set – probably belonging to an officer, a hat in box, boots, shoes and fragments of clothing.

PRESERVATION

When Vasa was raised, a giant puzzle remained to be reassembled. There were no plans or contemporary pictures of the ship, so the restorers had to work directly from the remains. Thousands of loose pieces from the collapsed upper part of the hull were raised and conserved, and then the right places for them had to be found on the ship. The wood of the conserved Vasa is said to be more than 95% original timber. In addition to the ship and the longboat, the Vasa Museum’s collections include over 45,000 loose finds. A temporary museum site was opened in 1962. The ship was sprayed for seventeen years, first with chilled fresh water, to expel the salt, control marine organism growth, and keep the timbers from shrinking. Then a polyethylene glycol spay was applied to expel the water and reinforce the cell structure of the timbers. In 1990 the new museum, fully enclosing the ship, was opened. In 2004 a new climate control system was installed, to maintain 18.5^oC and 55% humidity.

Vasa is exhibited with the three lower masts stepped and rigged, as she would be when laid up in the winter. In service, there would be topmasts and topgallant masts, above the fore and main lower masts, and a topmast at the mizzen, but little of the upper rig survived. It may have been salvaged shortly after the catastrophe and used on another ship.

The mizzenmast was the only one of the ship’s lower masts that did not survive, so a new mast was stepped in its place. Shrouds and stays were set up. The rigging of the ship was completed with the tops, the round platforms near the mastheads. Vasa had four of her ten sails set when she sank. The other six were found carefully folded and stored in the sail room when the ship was raised. Even though they were in very bad condition, it was possible to conserve and save them. The smallest sail, 32 square metres of hemp canvas, is exhibited in the museum. The five hundred sculptures on the ship reflect how King Gustav Adolf wanted the world to see Sweden and himself. Vasa was built for the war against Poland, and among the sculptures are several that belittle the enemy.

The ship’s stern is a large advertisement for Sweden and Sweden’s King, a 17th-century form of war propaganda. It included one of the King Gustav as a boy, with a griffin on either side. The artists behind Vasa’s sculptures came from Germany (mainly), Holland and Sweden. They carved in oak, pine and limewood in a renaissance to early baroque style. Motifs came from Greek mythology, the Old Testament, Roman history and from Sweden’s royal ancestors. Roman emperors, Greek gods, and Gothic warriors meet beautiful mermaids, angels and grinning demons.

The carvings were often symbolic, exalting the King and his empire, his claimed Roman and Goth ancestors, or mocking the Polish enemy, e.g. blocks on which the catheads rest show Polish noblemen cowering under tables, adjacent to the crew’s open-air toilets. More than sixty lions appear in the decorations, the most impressive being the three-metre-long figurehead in the form of a leaping lion, symbolising the King. Like the hull, today the sculptures are dark brown, because of their years under water and the conservation process.

For several years, the museum investigated the ship’s colour scheme. Hundreds of microscopically small paint chips were analysed. A completely different picture emerged of how the ship originally appeared. Vasa was painted in bright colours on a strong, red background when she sailed on her maiden voyage. Some of the carvings were enhanced with gold leaf decoration.

Vasa is said to be the world’s best-preserved 17th-century ship. In 2019 the museum had 1.53 million visitors, an all-time high, whilst 2023 saw 1.25 million visitors, a post- pandemic high. It claims to be the world’s most visited maritime museum and the most popular tourist attraction in Sweden.

In 2011 a programme of fitting stainless steel bolts in place of the rusted mild steel bolts, which had replaced the original iron bolts in the 1960s, began.¹¹ A major hull conservation programme began in Spring 2024, costing £11.8m. Cracks were appearing in the ship’s structure and a new external support cradle and internal support skeleton were needed to prevent the hull from collapse.¹²

Research had shown that the hull timbers had weakened due to chemical degradation in the wood, causing them to deform. The ship was also leaning slightly towards the port side. This inclination was increasing over time, making straightening of the ship imperative. The ship therefore needed a new support that could decelerate movements and deformations. Vasa was braced in a similar way as a ship in dry dock, on keel blocks with supports along its sides. The cradle dated back to the 1960s. It was reinforced in the 1990s, but not sufficiently.

The new support structures will ensure that the hull retains its existing shape and distributes loads in a manner that is gentle on the ship. Hull movements and the risk of cracking must be minimised. A critical part of the project is straightening the ship so that the masts are as straight as possible. This will be a difficult and delicate operation. The straightening work will probably be carried out once the entire support, both internal and external, is fully built since this will be the gentlest approach for the ship. ¹³

REFERENCES:

1. Vasa Museum, Guide to Vasa History, https://www.vasamuseet.se/besok/audioguide/audioguide-english/textversion, retrieved 5.3.24.
2. Clason, E., The Raising of the Royal Swedish Ship Wasa, Mariner’s Mirror, 48 (3), pp.161-186.
3. Hocker, F., Vasa: A Swedish Warship (Stockholm, 2011), pp.44-45.
4. Ibid, p.45.
5. Ibid, p.55.
6. Clason, op.cit.
7. Hocker, pp.126-127.
8. Ibid, pp135-140.
9. Ibid.
10. Vasa Museum, op.cit.
11. Vasa Museum, op.cit.
12. Miranda Bryant, ‘We have a lot of cracks’ – Swedes seek to save Vasa warship – again, The Guardian, 27.12.23, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/27/we-have-a-lot-of-cracks-swedes-seek-to-save-vasa-warship-again, retrieved 5.3.24.
13. Vasa Museum, Support Vasa, https://www.vasamuseet.se/en/explore/research/support- vasa, retrieved 20.3.24.

Dr Paul Brown is a maritime history author and speaker whose recent publications include Britain’s Historic Ships (Conway), Historic Sail, Maritime Portsmouth, and Abandon Ship (Osprey). A member of the Society for Nautical Research and the Britannia Naval Research Association, and Secretary of the Naval Dockyards Society, he is also a consultant to National Historic Ships, the UK’s authority on the preservation of historic ships and boats. He was previously a university lecturer and senior university manager, and has lectured at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.