WRECKS

Many of the wrecks in Nordic waters are surpris ingly intact. The worm teredo navalis that eats wood and destroys ship wrecks does not thrive in the brackish water of the Baltic Sea that contains very little salt. The cold and dark northern ship graves help to conserve the artifacts on board. When the Vasa ship was salvaged after lying at a depth of 32 meters in the Stockholm harbour for 400 years, archaeologists uncovered butter that was still edible.

DENMARK

The oldest ships found in Scandinavia until now have been in Denmark. In the Danish National Museum in Copenhagen you can see the 4th century B.C. Hjortspring boat. It is a twenty-man war canoe that was found in a bog where it had been placed as a sacrificial offering with spears and swords. The 25-meter long pre-Viking boat Nydam found at the German border (now at the Schleswig Holsteines Landesmuseum) is one of the earliest clinker-built rowing boats.

In the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde you can see the five Viking ships (ScPr Autumn'95) that were sunk to serve as a blockade in a narrow passage of the Roskilde Fjord, and excavated in 1962. The Skuldelev ships were all built in typical clinker fashion. Two of the knarrs were designed for cargo, two were warships for fast rowing and the smallest of the vessels seems to have been suitable for multiple purposes.

NORWAY

The most famous Viking ships are the Gokstad and Oseberg ships that you can study at the Viking Ship museum at Bygdoy in Oslo. The Oseberg, found in 1904, is the earliest Viking ship to have been discovered. The well-preserved Gokstad ship was discovered with all its treasures under a burial mound in 1880.

The warship Lossen that sank on Christmas Eve in 1717 was found in 1963 and the subsequent dives and excavations marked the beginning of Norwegian marine archaeology. Now there is a growing interest. Recently an amateur diver with a penchant for World Wár II memorabilia (ScPr Spring'O1) claims to have found Hitler's operating plan for the invasion of Norway in 1940. The documents that have been seized by the Norwegian police have allegedly been plundered from one of the 30 WWII warships sunk outside Narvik that have been classified as war graves. The diver has been charged for stealing, alternatively receiving stolen goods.

SWEDEN

The Vasa Museum (see page 24-25) is a visitors must, but many enthusiasts find the Kronan artifacts at the Kalmar Lánsmuseum even more interesting. Kronan was slightly smaller, and fifty years younger than Vasa, but so far she has yielded over twenty-three thousand artifacts that. have given us a whole new understanding of ship life in the 17th century. The large wreck site at a depth of 26 meters is a fantastic sight with bronze cannons, ornate decorations, pewter plates, clay pipes and skeletons. Everything is frozen to the time in 1676 when Kronan, the three-decked flagship of the Swedish fleet, engaged the DanishDutch enemy, together with a fleet of 60 warships. In the midst of this battle, Kronan capsized in a squall and then exploded. Only forty-two of some five hundred members of the crew survived. Kronan was found in the summer of 1980 by amateur underwater archaeologist Anders Franzén who also found the Vasa. He had been
digging into archives, inter viewing fishermen and "fishing" for Kronan since the 50s. In 1980 Franzén used side scan sonars and magnetometers (so sensitive that they can detect iron objects no larger than a nail) and found the magnificent ship six nautical miles off the coast.

Franzén has found many other historic ships and been a source of inspiration for amateur divers. There are so many of them now scouring the bottom of the Nordic waters that experts are getting worried about mass looting and museums of losing out on valuable historic artifacts that should remain in the public domain.

In 1984 divers re-discovered the wreck of the East India ship Gohheborg that had sunk outside the harbour of Gothenburg in 1745. The excavations evolved into a project to build a replica of the ship that will sail on its maiden voyage to China in 2004.

FINLAND

The sensational discoveries of the "champagne boat" Jönköping, the silver ship De Catherine and Vrouw Maria with Catherine the Great's treasures in the Finnish archipelago, has started a veritable wreck hunt. Mare Balticum was one of the world's busiest trade routes and many of the 5 000 - 6 000 well-preserved wrecks along it may hold treasures of gold, silver, precious stones, art, champagne and cognac that was en route to the Russian court. It was Rauno Korvusaari and his team who found both Vrouw Maria that sank in 1771 in the Åbo archipelago (not far from where Estonia sank in 1994) and De Catherine that sank in 1782 in the Ekenäs archipelago. Now both ships are in the hands of the museum authorities who generally want wrecks to be located and identified but then left alone. Swedish wreck hunter Peter Lindberg who concentrates on wrecks younger than a hundred years, that the Finnish state lays no claims on, made a fortune on alcohol sales from Jönköping and now has his sights set on three other wrecks in the same area. One of the ships that he is looking for in Finnish waters is believed to contain the finest champagne in the world bottled in hand-made crystal carafes, that are sure to fetch high prices on the auction block.

Scandinavian Press, Issue 4, 2001