As I mentioned yesterday, for a variety of reasons we don't tend to make a bee-line to museums; we are much more likely to seek out the food market than an art gallery. Yet we thoroughly enjoyed Vasamuseet today. I think it is because it has a point, it tells a powerful story with panache and style.
In fact it tells two stories, the first is a tale of hubris and folly that ended in disaster; the second is a story of curiosity and ingenuity and a case of latter-day ancestor
worship.
The Vasa was a large Galleon launched in 1628, the biggest warship in the Baltic at the time. The whole of Stockholm turned out to watch its maiden voyage, diplomats and ambassadors from across Europe. After less than two kilometres, as the mighty vessel rounded a bluff preparing to fire a salute to the onlooking crowd, it heeled over, water rushed through the open ports of the lower gun deck, slowly the ship filled with water and sank. It was a national disgrace and major diplomatic embarrassment.
Why this happened is a classic tale of political cock-up. The King, Gustav Adolphus aimed to make the recently independent nation of Sweden the most powerful in the Baltic. In order to do so he needed a large navy. Sweden had the wood, but no expert shipwrights. He recruited these from Holland.
In the mid 1620s the keel of a very large vessel was laid. However, before it was even half built, circumstances changed, Sweden lost four vessels in a sea battle with Russia and the king decided that three medium sized vessels would be better than one very big one. It was an HS2 moment, so many resources had already been committed to the big project that no-one had the political will to cancel it.
As the ship took shape, changes were made to the design. Without consulting the shipwrights, at considerable expense, the king ordered 72 large cannons, a second gun deck had to be constructed above the main one to accommodate them. The sails were made from locally produced flax, considerably weightier than the sailcloth used by other nations. Court papers at the time reveal concern about the stability of the design even before the Vasa had been fully fitted out. I suppose it would have taken a brave courtier to share those anxieties with the king, none did.
The result was it was almost inevitable, that when, on it's maiden voyage, the order was given to deploy the upper guns on the port side to fire an inaugural salute a slight gust was enough to capsize the Vasa. There were hundreds of people on board. Most were saved by the escorting flotilla. Contemporary estimates put the death toll at around 30 to 50 people.
And that should have been that, a sad but small footnote in the history of Northern Europe but during the 1950's divers began searching for the wreck. All they knew from contemporary records was that it had sunk in 30m of water. Figuring-in changes to the coastline over the last 300 years they checked for likely spots. Finally they came across an inexplicably mound of mud on the sea bed. A cursory first investigation found well preserved oak timbers, they had found the ill-fated Vasa.
Astonishingly the vessel's hull was in one piece, largely intact. The Baltic's relative low salinity had suppressed the natural process of detioration. Somewhat coyly the museum also cites the low level of oxygen in Stockholm harbour due to hundreds of years of pollution as a factor in the wreck's remarkable condition. I think this was a polite way of saying the city's waterways were a dead zone full of shit.
It took five months to pump the silt from the hulk. In the process as well as the hull,. 30,000 other fragments and remains were recovered. The hull was made watertight and in a painstaking operation lasting over two years the ship was moved into shallower waterers. The final moment when the Vasa was refloated is described on the museum's website:
On Monday, 24 April 1961, thousands of people crowded the shores around Kastellholmsviken, much as they had lined the shore almost 333 years earlier. Radio, television and newspaper reporters filled special media boats at the centre of the action, and Swedish Television broadcast live to all of Europe.
The clock showed 09.03 when the tops of a few eroded frames peeked out of the water. Soon, the carved heads of four warriors emerged, followed by the outline of the whole ship at last. It really was a ship, come back from the dead, a sensation. Even today, many still remember where they were when Vasa rose from the deep.
It took almost thirty years of chemical treatment, careful restoration and archeological exploration followed before the ship as we see it today could ve displayed to the public in a specially constructed museum.
The story of the ship's resurrection is perhaps even more remarkable as its demise. Both tell powerful human stories. The ship and the artefacts from it are astonishing. Equally powerful is the way the museum had been curated to tell the big story of skill, ambition, grandeur and folly, yet give equal status to the lives of the ordinary mariners who perished.
Three abiding memories will remain for me. The first is of the gloomy, mysterious wreck, itself whose richly hull seems to glimmer in the subdued light of the museum. We speculated if the designers of 'Pirates of the Caribean' had used the place as the basis of the Davy Jones locker scenes.
Secondly the workmanship of the Vasa's sculptural decoration, particularly the way the plain archeological remains were juxtaposed with recreations of the original colour based on chemical analysis. What appears sober now originally had the gaudy vigour of fairground folk art.
Finally, and perhaps most powerful of all was the section where the skeletal remains of the individuals recovered from the wreck. are shown next to vivid reconstructions of their faces based on the latest techniques in forensic science. It was a case where great scholarship combined with inspired curation can bring the past to life.
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