he who drew the sert and laid the keel. Would you accuse and convict a dead man?
Or perhaps Captain Hansson? He, more than anyone else, had been worried. He had demonstrated very clearly to Admiral Fleming what might happen.
Would you charge Admiral Fleming? He had no part in constructing the ship, nor in the sailing, though he could have prevented the launching. That is, he might have suggested this to his superior, Lord High Admiral Gyllenhielm.
Did Fleming in fact suggest it? We don’t know. Yet even if the records were complete they would not likely settle the question. Powerful men seldom expose themselves, as we have learned these past few years. Their fortunes depend too closely on the fortunes of their associates. That could be why Fleming was not charged with negligence.
Let us suppose he did urge his superior to cancel the launching and Gyllenhielm refused. Would you then charge the presiding officer of the investigative court? How many men in Gyllenhielm’s position would take such a risk?—because surely it would earn the king’s wrath. Gustav himself had approved the ship. He was most anxious for the Vasa to be launched.
Well then, the king. Gustav himself must be at fault. But who would be foolish enough to accuse the king?
What a shame the records are incomplete. How many scenes from this eerily familiar drama were lost? Did the court choose a scapegoat? Perhaps a sailor was flogged to death.
Alas, without the full account we can only speculate, and the vaporous conclusion remains not quite believable—until we reflect that, given a change of centuries and circumstances we might be reading yesterday’s newspaper. Ask yourself what punishment was administered for the crime at My Lai. Consider what happened. More than 100 civilians were shot by American soldiers: a fact as obvious as Old Glory. Yet the American government, in view of an expectant nation and most of the world, could not find anybody guilty. Years after the massacre one lieutenant was restricted to his barracks for a while, that was all. One lieutenant could not go dancing.
And why was nobody guilty? Because everybody was following orders. The king wished it so.
In other words, nothing changes. As the French aphorism tactfully reminds us: “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.”
Well, even before the inquiry opened, almost before the Vasa touched bottom, scavengers were descending on Stockholm: a Dutch shipwright, a Scottish baron, a “mechanicus” from Riga, somebody named “Classon,” “a man from Lubeck,” and various others.
First to obtain permission from the privy council was an Englishman, Ian Bulmer, who started to work less than three days after the catastrophe. He strung ropes from the Vasa’s masts to shore, hitched up teams of horses, and managed to pull the ship into a vertical position. What he planned to do next is not known, but the scheme failed and he either quit or was replaced.
For a while Admiral Fleming took charge. In July of 1629 he notified King Gustav: “As far as Vasa is concerned, we have been working with all industry, trying to raise her, but until now we have accomplished little . . . I have again fixed seventeen stout hawsers and chains with which, this week, if weather permits, we shall try to see what can be done. It is a heavier weight down there than I could have supposed.”
Some time after that the Scottish baron, Alexander Forbes, obtained the rights to all salvage operations in Swedish waters for a period of twelve years, though he knew nothing about marine salvage. When he was unable to raise the Vasa he leased the rights to a syndicate that included a Swedish colonel named Hans Albrekt von Treileben. Hans must have been a clever fellow; not only did he jiggle Baron Forbes out of the picture, be managed to get control of the salvage rights and then he went after the prize with a diving bell.
This recent invention, which resembled a church bell, was about four feet high and made of lead. The diver wore gloves, two pairs of leather boots, leather pants, a leather jacket lashed around his body to make it waterproof, and a wool cap. He stood on a platform slung beneath the bell and as he descended the water came up to his chest, leaving a pocket of compressed air at the top. He had a pair of pincers, a hooked pole, and some rope.
It seems impossible that a man with these elementary tools, inside a lead bell in frigid muddy water almost up to his neck, could accomplish much; yet the syndicate divers tore apart the Vasa’s superstructure and brought up about fifty cannons, most of which were sold abroad. Von Treileben then lost interest and began making plans for a voyage to the West Indies where he hoped to pick the bones of a Spanish galleon.
A man named Liverton, or Liberton, arrived in 1683 with a “special invention.” After being granted a license he recovered one cannon, which he tried unsuccessfully to sell to the Swedish government. That seems to have been the last salvage attempt.
It was now fifty-five years since Gustav’s monster went down. The tip of the mast had rotted away, or had been sawed off, so that nothing broke the surface. The Vasa was a hulk sinking imperceptibly deeper into the mud. And to the surprise of elderly citizens there were adults who never had heard of the famous ship.
How could it be forgotten? If you consider her size and prestige and splendor, as well as that spectacular maiden voyage—to say nothing of the evasive inconclusive court-martial which must have been talked about for many years—how could people forget the Vasa?
But of course it’s naïve to think like that. A nation is not anxious to remember its tragic miscalculations. Germany has been unable to forget Hitler, yet you can be sure that today’s German children do not think of him as their grandparents do, and by the long measuring rod of history the Nazi war has just ended. America cannot forget Vietnam, but be patient. Several centuries from now—unless our omniscient Pentagon does something cataclysmically stupid—you should be able to read American history without once encountering that painful word.
So, as debris stopped floating to the surface and mud built up against the hulk, and those who knew about the calamity died, the Vasa disappeared. Until at last there came a pleasant Sunday afternoon when the wharves were crowded with Stockholm citizens, none of whom could have told you anything at all about King Gustav’s benighted flagship.
In 1920 a Swedish historian was searching the archives for information about another seventeenth-century ship—the Riksnyckeln, which had sailed into a cliff one dark September night—when he came across the minutes of the Vasa court-martial and a reference to Treileben’s diving bell. Being an historian he naturally wrote a paper about it, and a boy named Anders Franzén heard about the Vasa because his father happened to read what the historian had written.
Now, the Franzéns usually vacationed on the island of Dalarö and there Anders saw a wooden gun carriage salvaged from the warship Riksäpplet which foundered in 1676. Although the gun carriage had been submerged more than two centuries the wood was still solid. This fact did not mean anything to him until 1939 when he took a boat trip with his father through the Göta Canal on Sweden’s west coast. There he saw the skeleton of another old ship, but its wood was spongy—eaten by the insatiable shipworm, Teredo navalis.
Given two long-submerged pieces of wood, one solid and one soft, most of us would say how curious and move on to something livelier. Young Franzén, however, did not let go. He thought there must be a reason for the discrepancy. The reason turned out to be Teredo navalis, which likes the taste of salt water. The Baltic around Stockholm has a salinity of 0.7 percent at most. Teredo navalis requires a minimum of 0.9 percent.
Again, after noting this tedious fact, most of us would move along. Not so young Franzén.
The Second
