Visiting the Vasa – Pic of the Week

This summer, I had the opportunity to travel around Scandinavia and other Nordic countries. Of all the interesting experiences from this trip, one stands out as particularly fascinating – visiting the Vasa Museet (museum) in Stockholm, Sweden.

The Vasa was a warship constructed between 1625 and 1627. With two gundecks and each broadside able to fire 550 pounds of shot, the 226-foot long Vasa was the “mightiest warship” of her day. Unfortunately, just 3,700 feet into her maiden voyage, she sank, in front of a crowd that had come to see her off. It was not the first breeze that took her out; though she heeled to port, she was able to right herself. However, when a second, stronger gust came up, the ship was pushed so far over on her port side that the open gunports on the lower gundeck filled with water and she quickly sank.

Most of the crew of 150 men survived but 30 members perished with the ship. Immediately after the ship sank, King Gustavus Adolphus (also known as Gustav II Adolf) demanded answers as to who was to blame and the Council of State began an inquest. The shipbuilders and crew turned on one another, blaming each other. However, it was the actual design that was faulty – a design that the king himself had overseen. This was a precarious situation for the Council of State because Sweden had, in its history, left the Kalmar Union, fought several wars, and was still fighting a war with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, trying to position itself as a dominant power within the region. Under the best of circumstances, one treads lightly when attempting to give a monarch bad news, and without a system of checks and balances on Gustavus Adolphus’s power, blaming him for the design faults of the Vasa was never an option.

However, there was an option that protected the king. As the inquest continued, and members of the crew and the shipbuilders were questioned, a scapegoat was found. In 1625, the king had signed a contract with Dutch master shipwright Henrik Hybertsson and his business partner, Arendt de Groote. Hybertsson passed away in 1626 and was unable to defend himself or his design.

After the inquest concluded, no one was officially sanctioned and many of the parties who had been arrested and questioned were, in fact, promoted. The man who had replaced Hybertsson continued to work in the navy yard until he retired, building several large ships for the Swedish navy. The captain of the Vasa became a supervising officer for the navy yard.

As the Vasa Museet notes,

“[p]erhaps the most interesting part of the inquest from a technical point of view is an appendix at the end, recording the opinions of a group of professional experts, captains and shipwrights. Without the benefit of calculus or modern naval engineering theory, they correctly identified the forces at work and the cause of the instability. As one of them put it, the ship did not have enough “belly” to carry the high and heavy upperworks.”

The Vasa was recovered from its watery grave in 1961 and has been on display to the public since 1990. There are concerns about its slow degradation but the Vasa Museet continues its efforts to preserve the ship and slow its deformation. While Sweden is not a party to the UNESCO Underwater Cultural Heritage 2001 Convention, Sweden does have a national committee on the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), which works to “promote the conservation, protection, rehabilitation and enhancement of monuments, groups of buildings, and sites” via adherence to article 3 of the ICOMOS Statutes.

For more information on the Vasa, see the following items from the Library of Congress collection:

• Greta Franzen, The Great Ship Vasa (1971)
• Ohrelius Bengt, Vasa, The King’s Ship (1963)
• Bertil Almqvist, The Vasa Saga: The Story of a Ship (1974)
• Carl Olof Cederlund, Vasa I: The Archaeology of a Swedish Warship of 1628 (2006)
• Russell Feedman, The Sinking of the Vasa: A Shipwreck of Titanic Proportions (2018)

Subscribe to In Custodia Legis – it’s free! – to receive interesting posts drawn from the Law Library of Congress’s vast collections and our staff’s expertise in U.S., foreign, and international law.