Today, a grand ship, badly built, becomes a time
capsule. The University of Houston's College of
Engineering presents this series about the machines
that make our civilization run, and the people
whose ingenuity created them.
King Gustavus Adolphus of
Sweden ruled the Baltic Sea in 1628. That year he
launched the warship Vasa.
Vasa looked just like its
contemporary, the Mayflower; only it
was twice as big.
Vasa was a 200-foot gun platform. She
had two rows of brass cannon -- 64 in all. She was
wildly ornate. Her stern was a glory of
brightly-painted carved figures of knights and
mythical beasts. She could've sailed right out of a
Crowds cheered as Vasa crossed the
harbor. Then wind filled her sails, and she began
to heel. She leaned and leaned 'til her lower gun
ports were under water. Water rushed in. She
foundered and sank. She carried 50 people to their
deaths 100 feet below.
The King, it seems, had meddled in the design.
Vasa was designed for only one row of
guns. He'd ordered a second row of 2500-pound brass
cannon to be added. There was only room in the hull
for 121 tons of stone ballast. That was far too
little. Vasa would be top-heavy, and
the shipbuilders all knew it.
Thirty-five years later, in 1663, a Swedish
inventor named Albrect von Treileben came on the
scene with a new diving bell. He managed to go down
and get most of the expensive cannons. The rest of
Vasa sat in the mud in the cold,
low-salt, Baltic Sea, largely forgotten, in a
remarkable state of preservation.
In 1956 the great wreck-hunter Anders Franzen found
Vasa on the bottom of Stockholm
harbor. He realized he could actually bring it up
whole, though it would be a Herculean job.
Divers went down and tunneled through the muck
under the hulk, dragging cables after them --
fearing a cave-in every moment. They attached the
cables to a system of floats above. By blowing
water out of the floats they managed to lift
Vasa a few feet at a time. They
stair-stepped her up to slightly shallower sea
beds, over and over, 18 times.
By 1959 Vasa finally surfaced, and
years of careful reclamation work began. Skeletons
of the old crew lie where they've died. One has
been crushed under a gun carriage. The mouth of
another opens in a terrible screaming rictus. Three
cannons had lain beyond the reach of 17th-century
divers. Now they rise from the mud along with
treasure, art, and a microcosm of 17th-century
daily life. Out of the mud rise life and death.
And we sort the many ironies of Vasa.
She was glorious in her finery, yet the crew lived
in near cesspool conditions. It cost more to
reclaim her than to build her in the first place.
But the greatest irony of all is that Gustavus
Adolphus's technological blunder created a time
capsule to serve history long after old naval wars
had been forgotten.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
Ohrelius, B., Vasa: The King's Ship (tr.
M. Michael). Philadelphia: Chilton Books, 1952 and
Franzen, A., The Warship Vasa: Deep Diving
and Marine Archaeology in Stockholm.
Stockholm: norstedt and Bonnier Pubs., 1961.
Kvarning, L-A., Raising the Vasa, Scientific
American, October 1993, pp. 84-91.
For more on the Vasa Museum in Stockholm, check out:
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-1997 by John H.
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