The Swedish warship Vasa. It sank in 1628 less than a mile into its maiden voyage and was recovered from the sea floor after 333 years almost completely intact. Now housed at the Vasa Museum in Stockholm, is the world’s best preserved 17th century ship
Kinda funny that the best example of its kind is the one that sucked as bad as it possibly could.
Oh, it was *ridiculously* bad. That initial post says “from the sea floor,” but that implies it made it out to sea.
So Gustavus Adolphus is king when Sweden is fighting wars all over the place. They need more ships, so he commissions four of them, two big and two small. The Vasa was supposed to be one of the smaller ones. Emphasis on “supposed to be.” Because Gustavus Adolphus keeps ordering changes. Like, add twelve more feet to the keel! Pile on the carvings! Add another gun deck for the hell of it! It got even worse when Sweden lost ten ships in a huge storm, so now they needed the Vasa *yesterday*. But Gustavus Adolphus is STILL demanding changes. So the shipwright scales up the measurements to try and make things work. Which might have worked, except the ship was being worked on by Swedes, Finns, Danes, Sami people. Communication is hard enough, but also it turns out that there are two different types of rulers being used by the workers. One is in Swedish feet and one is in Amsterdam feet. Amsterdam feet were only eleven inches long. (There’s a joke there I’m too tired to make.)
Anyway, because of that, the port side is heavier.
Okay, so you have to imagine the Vasa, with its hastily-scaled-up measurements, its *seven hundred* decorative carvings, its sixty-fucking-four bronze cannons. It’s a goddamn mess, AND its center of gravity is way off. Except that’s not something you could measure with instruments at the time. What you’d do is, you’d put it in the water, then have a bunch of guys run back and forth from port to starboard a bunch of times to test if it’ll tip over.
The guys who did this test could only do it three times before the Vasa was like, “I think I’m gonna hurl,” and almost tipped over right then and there.
Everybody there is like, “… uh-oh.” The admiral conducting the test just sighs and goes, “If only the king were here,” because Gustavus Adolphus wasn’t, and maybe if he had been he would have seen they fucked up and decided to pull the plug. Oh, and those bronze cannons? They weighed down the ship so much that the lowest row of gun portals was almost at the waterline.
But. Sweden needed the Vasa. It needed it to go to war. At that time, it was the most expensive thing Sweden ever spent money on.
SO. It’s August 10th, 1628. It’s the port in Stockholm. There’s music, there’s festivities, everybody’s showed up to see the Vasa off. A few ships tug the Vasa out to the current, let her loose, she drops four of her sails, and off she goes.
For about thirteen hundred meters.
Then, a light breeze blows. When I say light, I mean light. But that was all it took. The Vasa flops to port, water flows into the gun portals, and down it goes, still in the fucking harbor with its masts sticking out of the water.
So when that original post says “recovered from the sea floor,” it means brought up from the *actual harbor*. Like, within sight of the docks.
Oh, oh! But cool story about all this. Remember those sixty-four bronze cannons? Yeah, Sweden kind of needed those back, so about three decades later in 1658, the Swedes go down and retrieve almost all of them with a diving bell. Which is kind of badass.
