Stockholm, Sweden
We entered Stockholm before breakfast, with some of us enjoying the archipelago from the ship and others from Zodiacs. Either way it was a splendid beginning of a sunny day.
After breakfast, we took a bus to the Vasa Museum, home to the massive fighting ship, the Vasa. Launched in August 1628 with much fanfare as a symbol of Sweden’s power and status as a mighty Baltic empire, it proved unseaworthy and sunk inside the harbor on its maiden voyage after having sailed only a kilometer or so. The captain had suspected that the ship was too top-heavy to sail. Sweden’s great king, Gustavus Adolphus, had commissioned the ship with the intent of making it the largest and most powerful flagship in his navy. For this reason, he ordered that the ship have 64 cannons, which required two rows of cannons instead of one. This extra row gave the ship a more ominous appearance and also made it potentially more lethal in battle, but it also required that the ship’s designers and engineers build a taller ship than was the custom at the time. Unfortunately, they failed to make the ship wider and also failed to create adequate space in the bottom of the ship for ballast. Before sailing, the captain tested the ship’s seaworthiness by having several crew members run back and forth from port to starboard, at which point he noticed that it swayed more than it was supposed to. Although he was captain of the ship, he did not have the authority to call off its maiden voyage; only the king could have cancelled its launching and he was not present on the day the voyage began. As the captain feared, the ship began to “keel over in the lee” (as one observer later testified) when the winds picked up and soon thereafter it sank, killing an estimated 30 of the more than 300 persons aboard. An official inquiry was held, but ultimately nobody was held responsible, as it was designed to the specifications demanded by the king.
The Vasa rested on the Baltic floor for over 300 years, until a private salvager located its position in 1956 and managed to raise it and transport it to land a few years later. For the next several decades, Neptune Salvage and the Swedish navy oversaw its restoration and preservation, and in 1990 it was placed in a magnificent new museum. It now attracts nearly a million visitors each year and for good reason: it is a rare example of a nearly intact war vessel from the 17th century. The brackish muck of the Baltic seabed had preserved it unusually well.
In the afternoon, we went to one of two sites. Most of us took a guided walking tour of Gamla Stan (“Old Town”), the oldest and best-preserved part of medieval Stockholm. Others took a short Zodiac ride to visit Skansen, a charming outdoor museum that houses over 150 houses and other buildings that depict rural life in historic Sweden.
