Unlike the Sweden of modern times which is usually associated with neutrality, blond furniture, and incomprehensible art films about Thanatos playing chess, the Sweden of the early 1600s was a veritable butt-kicking highly militaristic expansionistic state consistent with its Viking ancestry. Although the Swedish navy at that time had been well-served with small but fast and deadly warships, the king, for reasons of prestige, ordered the construction of a fleet of huge lumbering war galleons bristling with two rows of guns as well as extremely high decks which would be useful when boarding other vessels. The first, largest, and most ornate of these galleons and the pride of the Swedish fleet was the Vasa. On the launch of its maiden voyage in 1628, the Vasa majestically sailed into the middle of the harbor of Stockholm and immediately capsized and sank.
The king was displeased and ordered that the responsible party or parties be located and brought to a swift and probably very unpleasant justice. In a scenario remarkably similar to the investigation of modern airplane crashes, the builder and designer of the boat claimed that it was the negligence of the crew; the crew (or at least the surviving members) claimed that the boat was designed and built top-heavy and was inherently unseaworthy. The shipbuilder claimed that he had originally wanted to spend more time and expense to incorporate a much wider and more stable hull but had been overruled by the king. It also became clear that the Captain had been ordered by the king to put on as impressive a show as possible for the foreign dignitaries at the launching and had thus violated the standard safety rules that you do not put a new ship under full sail and keep all of the gun ports open until after it has successfully passed its initial shakedown cruise. The king quietly abandoned his quest to assign blame for the disaster.
As revealed by this link, modern researchers have determined that the vessel was in fact unseaworthy. The shipbuilder, unfamiliar with vessels of multiple gun decks, overcompensated for the weight of the guns and incorporated too much lumber into the design, thus making the ship top-heavy. In addition, the workers building the ship used two different kinds of rulers in making their measurements. The Swedish foot was about one inch longer than the Amsterdam foot. The workers apparently used Swedish rulers on the port side and Amsterdam on the starboard, resulting in an asymmetrical vessel which automatically leaned towards the larger port side. The sailing of the vessel with open gun ports was the final nail in the coffin.
Unlike the Swedes, the Spanish, English, French, Dutch, and Portuguese had good luck building and sailing these ponderous types of vessels. In fact, in some instances, they got over 20,000 miles per galleon.
The Vasa was raised in 1961 and is now in a museum in Sweden. It is the only surviving galleon in the world, primarily because the cold water in Stockholm Harbor spared the wood from shipworms and the intense pollution present in the harbor water for centuries killed off any wood-eating bacteria. Once the ship was raised, exposure to the air of the wood which had been impregnated with pollutants for over 300 years produced and is still producing huge quantities of sulphuric acid and formic acid, which make conservation of the ship difficult.
Thanks to the Disney Pirates of the Caribbean film series, millions of people now know what the Vasa looks like. It was the model for the movies’ spectral pirate vessel The Flying Dutchman.
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