THE WARSHIP VASA

For years the motor boat of amateur naval historian Anders Franzén could be seen combing the waters of the Stockholm harbour in his search for an ancient warship. He dragged the sea bottom with grapnels and wire sweeps and later confessed "my booty consisted mainly of rusty iron cookers, ladies' bicycles, Christmas trees and dead cats."

Then on August 25, 1956, Anders Franzén sank his home-made core sampler at a point 100 meters off the naval island of Beckholmen. The hollow punch of the sampler contained a piece of blackened oak. A few days later the Naval Authorities agreed to send down Anders Franzén with a salvaged mermaid the diver Per Edvin Fälting. Over his crackling diver's telephone from a depth of 32 meters, he reported: "I can't see anything, since it's pitch-dark here, but I can feel something big - the side of a ship. Here's one gun port and here's another. There are two rows. It must be the Vasa."

The find was a major sensation but it took two weeks for the evening paper Expressen to eventually publish a first small notice: "An old ship has ben found off Beckholmen in the middle of Stockholm. It is probably the warship Vasa, which sank on her maiden voyage in 1628. For five years, a private person has been engaged in a search for the ship."

The 38-year old Anders Franzén was not even named but it was his efforts, together with the help of a few backers like the old King, that eventually drummed up enough support to raise the ship. The Neptun Salvaging Company offered to lift the Vasa for free, the Navy volunteered men and boats and a "Save the Vasa" campaign was launched.

After the first finds of a sculptural lion and a cannon were salvaged during the exploratory dives, a Vasa fever started spreading. But no one could have guessed that the magnificent ship would eventually become one of the world's foremost tourist attractions.

There were many suggestions on how to raise Vasa that had sunk up to its original waterline in mud and silt. One was to freeze the ship into an immense block of ice and let her float to the surface. Another was to fill the Vasa with enough table tennis balls to float her.

In the end six steel cables were inserted under the hull by way of a very laborious tunneling process carried out by the Navy divers. Per Edvin Fälting in all spent one and a half year or 12 000 hours under water assisting in the salvage operation.

When the steel wires were in place the huge Oden and Frigg salvage pontoons moved in to place to lift the 500 ton Vasa in sixteen different underwater lifts until she rested at a 16 meter depth next to the island of Kastellholmen . Here Vasa lay for two years while the divers filled the thousands of holes formed where iron bolts had rusted away so that the hull would become water-tight once again.

On April 24, 1961 after 333 years under water Vasa finally broke the surface with newspapers, radio, and television teams from all over the world following the event. With pumps furiously working she could be pulled into the Beckholmen dry dock floating on her own keel a few days later.

Today you can see the warship V asa in almost all its former glory. Carpenters are still working on the top deck that had been destroyed by the ten anchors found there. The 17th century divers had managed to rescue 45 of the valuable copper cannons shortly after Vasa sank. In 1995 the lower rigging was installed so now Vasa looks the way ships were kept during the winter months when the masts were taken down.

Outside the Vasa Museum you can see the silhouettes of the masts sticking out of the copper roof to a height of 52 meters. One of the world's oldest sails from Vasa is on show in the Museum that is full of so many interesting exhibits that the French Guide Michelin has awarded it three stars.

Water-logged wood starts splitting and shrinking after only a few days in warm, dry air. So it was important to preserve the hull, 13 500 wooden components of various sizes, 500 figure sculptures and 200 ornaments, plus 12 000 small objects made of wood, textiles, leather and metal. As soon as the ship was in its own temporary building it was sprayed with a preservative solution 24 hours a day for 17 years. Even today the Vasa is very fragile. Air must be kept at Ø percent relative humidity, with a temperature around 20C and lighting must not exceed 50 lux. That is why the beautiful Vasa Museum has air locks leading into the magnificent ship in the semi-darkness.

Vasa was the most expensive and richly ornamented naval vessel ever built in Sweden at this time. Her captain and builder were taken to court after the disaster, but no one was punished. Today we know that Vasa simply was too large and heavy so that all that was needed was "a small gust of wind, a mere breeze, that overturned the ship."

What was a national catastrophe for Sweden has become a fantastic treasure through of historical information for us now because Vasa is a unique time machine that will fascinate evervone that visits her.

Scandinavian Press, Issue 4, 2001