Vasa - Sinking, Wreck and Salvage (Part 2)

[Music] well in part one a few months ago we saw how vasa was built why it was built and effectively the situation that led up to the circumstances of it setting sail on its maiden voyage from which of course it didn't come back but there's an awful lot more to the story of vassa than just that there's as it went down how it ended up in the state that it ended up in how it got salvaged what was found aboard what its actual capabilities could have been all sorts of things and we're going to look at a little bit more of its history today continuing again with our interview very kindly provided by dr fred hocker the director of research at the vasa museum so without any further ado let's get on to what the expert has to say so obviously when the ship has gone down and it's it's considered lost we look at it now you can look at the mary rose and there's about a third of that left um look at maybe something like the newport ship and there's bits and pieces of that left i think there's a little bit more of the brem and cog around but that's mostly the underside whereas when we look at vasa it's pretty much all there so how did that end up how did it end up basically in one piece when practically everything either side of it that sunk has ended up as scattered fragments or bits of hull right well also was very lucky in where it sank in salt water there are macro fauna you could say uh that eat wood uh most well known is teredo novalis although there are other species of terrain as well that do that shipworms that will destroy wood that is exposed to the water very quickly there's also a crustacean luminoria lignosa gribble that will do a lot of damage plus there are microscopic organisms bacteria erosion bacteria that eat away the cells from the inside that's why what's left of ships in salt water is what gets buried quickly so those organisms can't live there's a lot left of the brain of cog because it was buried in mud relatively quickly so it's preserved right up to the deck it's it's in quite good shape mary rose is much of the starboard side because it healed over to that side and that side got buried vasa is about a little bit more than 98 complete at least up to the up to the level in the hall we also have the lower foremast and main mast complete and a few yards and a lot of other bits of the rigging and that's because the conditions in stockholm harbor are particularly good for the preservation of organic material and that's because the water is cold fresh and polluted that the temperature is about three degrees celsius year round where the ship sank the salinity is very low it's virtually fresh water and the things that eat wood need salt water and warmer water and then because the water is polluted there's no oxygen at the bottom it's an anaerobic environment and the bacteria that would eat the wood at the microscopic level need oxygen and so the bottom of stockholm harbor is effectively dead nothing grows and so there was really nothing to eat the ship there's a little bit of bacterial damage not much what we see in terms of damage is mostly man-made after the ship sank it was not considered lost it was only considered underwater and so there was a contract given to an english engineer ian bulmer directly after the ship sank who he believed he could get the ship up it was sitting on the bottom at an angle of about a list or a lean of about 20 degrees and he managed to get it upright again but he couldn't break it free of the mud and there were several other attempts into the 1630s to raise the ship without success by the 1660s it was accepted that the ship itself was no longer salvageable but it was known that there were 64 bronze guns on it that it cost about twice as much as the ship had and they were still valuable and so there was a a privilege or a an opportunity given to some entrepreneurs to recover guns and using a diving bill they managed to recover most of the ship's guns and sold them in order to do this they tore up the upper deck they probably also the ones who took the masts down in order to get their diving belt into the middle of the ship but they laid the masts carefully next to the ship instead of disposing of them so we still have those two and and so we're missing the planking of the upper deck where they rip that up to get at the guns below but they didn't do much more damage than that then there is some erosion of surfaces that were exposed to the water the ship sank into the mud up to about the water line and then once the nails corroded through very quickly everything that was nailed on fell off that's most of the sculptures and they landed in the mud where they were covered and protected so well that a lot of them still have paint on them but those parts that stood up in the water well the the harbor of stockholm is a river in fact the name of it is the stream and it's the outflow from an inland lake and so it's a steady current full of sediment so it acts like a low-grade sand blaster and so it gradually eroded away the original surface of those parts of the ship that were above the mud and so we've lost maybe 10 or 15 millimeters in some places of that original surface but the because the timbers are so large it doesn't make a substantial difference to their strength in the 19th century there was an anchor dragged through the ship which demolished the stern castle but didn't carry it away it just broke it up and it ended up lying on the bottom of pieces and then in the 20th century there were loads of blasting rubble from construction projects around stockholm that were dumped on it that did a little bit more damage one of those rubbles was dumped here in this cabin for example that one a big load that demolished their what was standing at this cabin and crushed it down onto the deck but otherwise the timber is all there and generally speaking in very good shape and presumably they didn't know they were dumping a bunch of rock on top of an old warship correct that nobody people knew there was there was knowledge of people who worked in the harbor that a big ship had sunk approximately where but not exactly where and so and the people who were dumping blasting rubble didn't care and with that preservation um we've obviously been looking around the museum there's an awful lot of other material that survived in inside the ship which is stuff that you wouldn't see i think practically anywhere else um i mean i've been to the mary rose museum they've got a lot of leather they've got a lot of wood that's and some bone and pewter that survive but there's there's things here um like this short jacket coat thing um if i'd if you hadn't told me that was an original piece i would have assumed that's a replica because it looks like it's in that good a condition now granted some of the things like the sales are not in such great condition but considering that they were probably a lot rawer material compared to the the um the clothing that's not necessarily a surprise but how much have we learned from all this preserved material for of the ship about life aboard the ship life in 16 early 1600s sweden compared to what we knew without the ship well the conditions of preservation are very good for organic material generally so things like wood leather and cloth survive quite well in the bottom of stockholm harbor conditions are terrible for metal we have almost no iron remaining other than cast iron because of its carbon content and the anchors because they're just so big that they haven't they hadn't corroded away yet so our collection of tools for example we have about 250 woodworking tools from the ship about 200 of those are sticks about this lawn they're the handles to things like axes and asses the heads have simply disappeared so that's where other ships like mary rose still has iron objects surviving in recognizable forms that we simply don't have but organic preservation is very very good our the timber objects the wooden things are not very badly decayed even that paint on their surfaces survives in a lot of cases we have good preservation for leather very good preservation for certain types of cloth animal based fiber like wool and silk survives very well under water plant fiber cotton linen and doesn't survive as well we're fortunate that we have an utterly unique find in the form of six of the ship's sales plus the two sales for the ship's boat in recognizable form but mostly because they were well down in the hall and they were very quickly buried other places in the ship our textile finds are mostly wool and silk so we have wool jackets that are missing the linen linings the majority and all together we have about forty thousand finds from the ship nine thousand of those are lead musket balls from ammunition another four thousand are copper coins small denomination if you added them all up together they wouldn't have paid the captain's salary for the summer but the majority of the material that we have are the personal possessions of the crew really we don't know how many people were on board but something around 150 people probably and a bunch of them had brought on chests or boxes or barrels or sacks with their spare clothing and other personal possessions and that's a lot of what we have in the collection so we're able to say a lot about the people who are on board the ship and because the swedish navy was mostly manned by conscripts rather than professional mariners what we're looking at is a cross section of swedish society from the land not not specifically necessarily maritime people but farmers and townspeople who have been conscripted into the navy because then swedish navy also allowed sailors to have their wives on board as long as the ship was in home waters we not only have men we also have women we have the skeletons of 15 to 17 people and two of them are women because they would be a normal part of a ship's community in this period in sweden so we have a pretty good cross-section of swedish society not just a ship's company and from that material we can learn a lot we have a big project that we've got going on right now looking at all the clothing and shoes that's about 12 000 individual fragments of cloth and leather and what we realize is this is the largest collection of ordinary people's everyday clothing in the world from before 1700 all from one context all of this in use at the same time and so we can say a lot about how ordinary people dressed and these are the people who don't appear in historical documents nobody writes down how what kind of clothing a peasant owned or what kind of shoes he wore that kind of thing so we learned a lot about the the lives of ordinary people because of all of this material we also learned a lot about how the navy mandate ships by seeing who these people are looking at the skeletons to get some sense of what what's the demographic of the crew and these these are the kinds of things that you can't find from other sources you need to look at the people in their and their possessions themselves you mentioned when the statues fell off that they were still had some of their paint left aboard now obviously we have the standard sort of trope that you see in a lot of films set from the medieval period pretty much all the way up the victorian period where everything is varying shades of brown and this is very obviously not the case with with the vasa the the ship itself is mostly brown because it's spent hundreds of years under water but the actual statute statuary and other features when they've been recovered they actually show quite a range of color to them so was that typical across europe or was that something specific to sweden or to a region um obviously we've been mentioning sovereign of the seas a few times you know that we're covered in gold leaf practically everywhere this ship has some gold leaf but nowhere near that kind of level but it's a lot more colorful so where does that sit well the um valsa is an example a slightly late example of the renaissance style that we call mannerism it's a style that uses polychrome so very bright colors sort of extra natural colors you might say that to in a very vibrant even garish sort of approach and this multicolored or polychrome approach to ship decoration had been typical all over northern europe through most of the 16th century we can see in baker's manuscript from 1580 in england where he does watercolor renditions of a number of ship designs they're all very brightly painted in multiple colors kind of the english tended to follow a scheme of dividing the ship into square panels by horizontal and vertical elements and having painted scenes in those panels or using geraldine images and that sort of thing and so valsa is in that same tradition of very brightly colored and polychrome and that really didn't start to change until the 1630s with sovereign of the sea sovereign was a departure in england from what had come before the idea of basically a single colored background some dull dark color dark blue black and then gilding in contrast to that against that black background it's a very it's a very impressive very elegant and stately look and if we even look at ships late in the sailing ship period like victory uh victory's combination of black and that buff brown color is derived from sovereign of the seas and that gold on black background idea and that you can't afford to gild every ship that early but you can paint it yellow yeah which will create and there were ways to use uh ochre and orcament and pale yellow paints to create the impression of gilding in a distance so that black and yellow or dark blue and yellow combination became a long-standing worship tradition after the 1630s but up to that point it had been the polychrome had been the way to go and it survived well into the 17th century in dutch ships you look at paintings from the anglo-dutch wars you can immediately tell the english ships from the dutch ships because of the color color schemes and it survived in sweden until uh the 1660s when uh the swedish navy started employing english shipwrights and adopting english fashion and ship design and decoration i guess it shows again how much of a confluence point vasa represents because appearance wise it's got a lot more in common with the gun decks and the general layout with sovereign of the seas which is a bit later but looks wise colors wise it's got more in common with the mary rose which is a much earlier vessel with the coloration right in terms of the color but mary rose had virtually no sculpted decoration on it it was painted on a flat background and what you see in the 17th century is that that polychrome painted tradition is then supplemented by three-dimensional sculpture we can see it at the end of the 16th century we start to see the first appearance and then an explosion of it all through the 17th century of this proliferation of carved work even on merchant ships who you that you think these people are counting the cost of everything but it's still an important part of shippness of being a ship if you want to as a merchant communicate to the world you're a successful merchant your ships have carvings on and so it becomes part of how you express the identity of a ship is this profusion of carved work and then the the painting tradition changes as you move from mannerist renaissance into a baroque idea and then in the 18th century the the level of carb decoration tends to get reduced gradually until you see something like victory if you look at victories though you still see there's a lot of card work on the stern in terms of foliage and fruit and figures around the stern but then at the beak head you're seeing much more plain moldings very much in the georgian style of furniture you could see but then you still have elaborate figureheads being carved in the 18th early 19th century until by the later you know by the time you get well into the 19th century you're a very very plain much more functional looking in a in a way that also is part of that communication of the ships of the ship's purpose that once you get to the iron navies and the steel navies and and uh steamships they they go for a very different aesthetic but it's still an aesthetic there's still people who care about how those ships look and the impression they get when the ship went down do we know roughly i know we said we know roughly how many people were aboard do we know roughly how many people got away because we obviously there are a number of skeletons found but presumably someone who maybe got caught in a net on the upper deck they might have the body might drifted away over time right do we know roughly how many people are actually lost with the ship we do and not roughly i mean fairly accurately there are four different contemporary accounts that talk about how many people died it's interesting they follow the same pattern we see today in disaster reporting you think about 911 or or the apartment building that burned in britain yeah grandfather what you see there is the very first reports say it's a big disaster and we have no no idea how many people died um and then you see then you start to see people trying to estimate well we know there were 4 000 people in the building so it could have been that many but we don't and and then and then people start to show up you start to be able to count noses of people who are alive you go into the wreckage you can start counting dead bodies and so that number gets refined until eventually you get to a you know there's a final number for how many people died on 9 11 that's quite specific well the same thing happened with also the very first report the day after when the council wrote to the king who was then in poland uh the ship is sunk but we don't know how many people have died until we can have a muster so we can count and then there's a report from a danish spy kraba who wrote back to his spymasters in denmark and reported that he had heard that half a hundred people had died 15. and then there's a report from an english agent james spence who wrote back to charles the first government um and he reported that he had heard that 40 people had died and then about two weeks after the sinking a member of the council ruling sweden wrote to his brother who was the chancellor with the king in poland who's very specific and he said 30 people including women and children we can double check his math because he also reported how many guns were lost and how deep the water was and we can see that he was correct for both of those numbers because there's an inventory of how many guns were on the ship when it sailed and his number matches up pretty well there and he gets the depth right he was also in the best position to know after two weeks of stragglers showing up injured people dying that sort of thing so when he says 30 we're pretty sure it's right around 30. of those people we have the skeletons of at least 15 somewhere between 15 to 17 plus isolated bones that could represent another few people so just over half right and the reports of the sinking say that most of the people who died died because they were trapped in the ship the ship sank relatively quickly but it was only 120 meters from shore on a warm summer day and so a lot of people swam ashore if you couldn't swim even after the ship came to rest on the bottom the masts were out of the water so you could hang on to something until a boat picked you up so we think they were right that most of those people trapped in the ship who died um and once the once the ship had gone down obviously it had briefly been the flagship um it had been a flagship um the swedish navy was divided into three squadrons each of which had a flagship and this was the command ship for the reserve squadron uh based in swedish waters at that point in the campaigning season but there were two other ships that also had flagships okay so did its loss being a fairly substantial vessel did it markedly affect the flow of naval warfare that sweden was involved in at the time or was it kind of sort of one of those inconveniences that happens but we can shuffle everything around to make good well gustav ii not off was always quite fortunate in his timing and he lost a lot of ships to accidents in the 1620s the swedish fleet was about somewhere between at any point between 30 and 40 combatants plus a lot of auxiliaries but in the course just in between 1625 and 1628 18 of those ships were lost 10 in one storm voss is one of three ships lost in accidents in 1628 only two of those were lost to enemy action in the one naval battle of gustavo's reign in 1627 off the coast of poland um because of the way gustavo was using his navy in the years that followed the loss of also really didn't make any kind of significant strategic difference that we can detect it was embarrassing of course but it doesn't seem to have made a difference in how the king planned his campaigns that we can detect okay and so coming to the other end of its stay on the bottom um what was the process for finding it and bringing it back to the surface was it kind of a national thing of we want to bring this back up as part of our history or was it sort of one person's like oh yeah well there's this ship i want to just i'd find it because that's what i want to do so what was the motivation and how did that all come to pass the the modern vasa project started with one person much in the way that the mary rose project started with alexander mckee that bosses started with a private citizen who was a civilian employee of the navy named anders francine he was a an engineer a fuels and lubricants engineer and he was interested in the navy's history and he set himself the task of trying to find the wrecks of 12 famous ships that had sunk in the 16th and 17th centuries and he was slightly ahead of the game because three of them had already been found in the late 18 late 19th early 20th centuries and he knew people who had been involved in those projects and so he started searching for valsa in 1954 and he started out by talking to a history professor who told him where to look history professor was wrong because the history professor was reading secondary sources from the 18th century about where the ship had some not primary sources the ship had never been forgotten there was always this knowledge within the navy about the loss of vasa it was always used as a cautionary tale don't let this happen to you but in the winter of 1955-56 several things all happened frank saying became realized he needed to do more research himself so he started looking in the national archives for the primary accounts of the laws which all point into a different place they all say the same thing they say exactly what the ship sent to within 200 yards andy came in contact with the navy's chief salvage diver who knew the bottom of stockholm harbor reasonably well and he was given a new chart of the harbor that had been made that year because there was a plan to build a bridge across the harbor the lower part of the harbor that would have run right over the spot where it also lay and so he was given a very detailed chart of soundings that had been made in the summer of 1955 and they showed a very distinct hump in the bottom it was about six meters taller than everything around it and about 50 meters long and he when he asked about that he was told by the engineers oh that's the blasting rubble from when they were building the docks on back home but when he talked to the salvage diver the salvage driver said well not not the 1920s construction because we dumped that somewhere else but it could be from the eight 19th century docks maybe we've all looked there and so friend and it's where the accounts said the ship sank in front of beckholm and so he they started looking there the two of them uh and in the course of the in the late summer on the 25th of august 1956 the they were using a drag a small grapple towed behind the bow and it fastened into something and then they used a coring device basically a weight with a punch in the end of it and it brought back a sample of black oak waterlogged a very old oak that had been underwater a long time and so they moved over 20 yards 20 meters and then got another plug of black coat that indicated okay the big some the big hump on the bottom here is a wooden structure so that was enough for the two of them to persuade the navy to detach diving assets and they sent a small diving vessel and two divers who died on the site about a month later and discovered it was a ship sitting on the bottom a ship upright and intact but two full rows of gun ports there was no other ship of that size that sank in the harbor in that area there are other big warships in the harbor there are a whole bunch of them that were used as a foundation for a bridge about 30 about 10 years after boston we know where those are too so that was enough to create the project at that point the real genius of this was not in finding the ship it wasn't really lost the genius was francine's ability to persuade people that this was a worthwhile project his enthusiasm was so infectious that he managed to persuade the navy the national heritage board the national maritime museum and the biggest salvage private salvage company in scandinavia to all contribute their resources to raising the ship and making it the centerpiece of a museum none of them would have done it on their own and none of them would have done it if france hadn't sold the idea he also managed to get the royal family involved so the court was behind it and the king assigned the most popular member of the entire royal family prince bertol to be the head of the foundation that would raise the ship so it got a lot of publicity it got a lot of popular attention just at the moment when sweden's modern economy was taking off a lot of historians refer to the 50s and the 60s in sweden as the age of possibility the people dreamed big massive redevelopment of the city of stockholm construction of the modern expressway network expansion the rail system all sorts of things and so the idea of raising an ancient ship was not it was not considered lunacy that the government got behind it the the navy did all the diving uh the national heritage board agreed to conserve stuff the national maritime museum agreed to provide historical expertise there was some opposition there were a few politicians who were opposed to money being spent on this instead of making people's lives better you know the same sort of people who are opposed to the space program and things like that but generally speaking it wasn't a very big drain on the public purse until it after it had been recovered and then the state took over the task of preservation and so the navy transferred ownership of the vessel which it owned by the right of sovereign immunity to the national maritime museum in 1964 and the foundation that had been set up transferred its assets to the national maritime museum and they became responsible for conservation so they they paid for the process of preserving the ship and so when i remember when i was very small going to portsmouth and seeing mary rose and being a little bit disappointed that it appeared to be a gigantic warehouse full of mist through which you could see the occasional timber emerging as infinite amounts of glycol was sprayed everywhere um what was the preservation process for vasa obviously it's not being sprayed with glycol now but great the the method that was used on mary rose is a development of the method that was pioneered on balsa polyethylene glycol had been developed by the forest products industry they thought it was a way that you could stabilize green timber and use it immediately rather than having to go through the curing process saving time money etc it ended up not being used for that but the chemical ended up having all kinds of other uses you and i are wearing it right now it's a standard ingredient in shampoo lip balm mcdonald's milkshakes hershey bars i mean there's all sorts of uses for it but it can be used to stabilize wet wood and so the method that was used on faucet is the same one that was later used on mary rose which was to spray it for long periods with the solution of peg and water gradually increasing the concentration as the ship absorbed the pad the method used on boston was fairly crude compared to the method used on mary rose mary rose was able to take what had been learned from doing balsa develop it into a much more effective application method but the basic method was to spray it with polyethylene glycol involves this case it was sprayed for 17 years it's a little less than they did on mary rose and then slowly dried to an ambient humidity of initially 60 now here in the museum is about 53 and so and that method replaces the water that is bulking out the cells with this water-soluble wax and as that dries it stabilizes the cells rather than letting atmospheric pressure crush them and so it doesn't just all come to pieces so try it out and in boston's case that that peg only goes in about two centimeters into the surface that the core of the wood is still sufficiently in sufficiently good condition that it's it's it's not water it's not penetrable okay and so it's surviving on its original what remains of its original strength which we estimate from tests to be somewhere around 50 of its original strength and then it was brought into this museum was the museum built around the ship or is it built brought to the building uh how did we get the ship in the bottle that's what we call that question um the museum is built over an old dry dock you'll be interested because it was a drive i built for the first generation of armored warships in sweden swedish navy in the 1870s after they went from monitors to proper yeah what they call possible and in the navy had outgrown it it was really a little too small for anything that they were current then still using it but this was a navy base and so the navy said that that could be used for the museum and so the museum building was built over it but leaving the wall at the open end of the dry dock open and so the ship after it had been raised had been refloated on its own keel initially for about a day to get it onto a concrete pontoon so it would be possible to move it around within stockholm afterwards and it sat on that pontoon all through the conservation process and then once this the shell of this building was more or less finished in december of 1988 the pontoon with the ship on it was moved from the conservation lab and then floated into the museum the dry dock was closed and drained and a bunch of concrete pilings have been built in the bottom of the dry dock and the pontoons settled onto those and then they've built the last wall of the museum closed the interior space so it's watertight so we can't flood it again and then subdivided the pontoon ship still sits on that pontoon and it's our main storage area for collections and furniture and the wine cellar for the restaurant so there is another level below that's the first floor the the bottom floor of the museum is actually the second floor the the first floor is inside the pontoon there's actually a zero floor which is the space in the drive up under the pontoon which is about that high yeah probably not not the best to explore it's interesting it's all the climate plan is down there for example so with with the museum as a whole um obviously it's here to display vasa and the artifacts that are found with it um at the moment at the time the filming obviously would close because of the current uh covid um but for people who might want to now come maybe come and have a look at it once it's all reopened are there are there any sort of tips you give for visiting the museum good times of the year to visit normally how long should you allow for it that kind of thing uh we are well in normal times uh we are open 365 days a year we're not closed on mondays or holidays so come anytime uh we are busiest during the summer june july and august uh that's very much because of cruise ship traffic into stockholm overloads us so uh it'll be a very crowded museum if you come in the summer but it's a big place we can take 2 000 people at a time if you come outside of the summer months any time is good outside of the summer months we also have evening programming going on in the form of lectures or other events not just running around the museum i think that people ought to budget about two hours at a minimum if they're coming on their own if they want to see everything we have to offer we have a restaurant in the museum and so you can build your visit around having lunch here and that restaurant is open for most of the time that we're open uh gets good reviews as a restaurant uh the uh and then uh we are normally open uh our open hours for most of the year are 10 a.m to 5 p.m in the summers we have been open 8 30 a.m to 6 p.m and in the winter we're often open until 8 p.m we have before the coveted crisis we were looking at changing those hours because of our increasing visitor numbers to accommodate the large number of visitors we were getting i don't know what's going to happen once we reopen permanently once tourism settles down again presumably there'll be a vaccine and we'll be able to return to some kind of a normal life so i can't really predict that yet but it'll probably be something like that so if you think in terms of a 10 a.m to 5 p.m opening time we're always open that amount of and you can come any day of the year that you like okay our admissions policy is that uh we have one price for adults and uh children are free that is our current pricing policy sounds sounds all fairly reasonable um i've been looking through the artifacts in the museum and elsewhere in the video obviously they'll be i'll be looking at some specific ones and talking about those um but of all the things that have come off of vassa that you've looked at what would you say do you think is the best or your favorite artifact uh i would say my favorite artifact is whatever group i'm studying at that time but there are several things that i that i i come back to fairly often um we have one group of objects that are unique and that's the sails from the ship they just don't survive in other places do you have a whole most of a set of 17th century sales i i've often said virtually everything else that we have on the ship you can find a better one at the museum next door our next door neighbor is the nordic museum which is the museum of basically folk life in sweden and so they have cups and plates and bowls and lanterns and furniture from the same period as balsa that hasn't been underwater for 333 years and so it's in better shape what sets the collection of also apart is the context it all comes from one moment at the same place and the ship the ship is also unique and and i came into this as a i was a wooden shipwright before i was an archaeologist and so i'm fascinated by the ships themselves so i always come back to the ship as the center and it's the centerpiece of the museum um other things that i've uh that i find interesting right now we're working on the clothing and the shoes and realizing how comprehensive that collection is and that it's unique as a record of the everyday clothes of ordinary people the people we don't see in royal palace collections of cronin of coronation roads um i think that's fascinating that's an interesting collection on its own outside of the context of awesome and the and the occasional individual object that i find intriguing recently i've been looking at a sundial a little pocket sundial about five centimeters long and it's been possible to identify who made it because it was a standard model for one particular maker in nuremberg and and then that lets me reconstruct the missing bits of it because it's i can take the whole ones in her in other collections figure out how it was used why somebody on board might have it and that leads me into an entire story about how did you tell time in the 17th century or how did you navigate a ship in the 17th century who would have owned an object like that would have been moderately expensive so why and why did they have it another object that we've looked at recently that i really have enjoyed is one chest of one person's belongings to look at all the stuff that this one guy thought that he was going to need on board the ship and so there's a pair of shoes a pair of overshoes pair of mittens a really nice hat this is all the stuff he wasn't wearing when the ship sank this is he had something else on when when the ship sang plus uh he had the the parts for another pair of shoes already cut out and a shoe last so either he was a shoemaker he was prepared to take it to a shoemaker to have another pair of shoes made he had his sewing sewing kit with him a ball of silk thread and a little blob of wax to run the thread through and a thimble a tailor's thimble kinda was associated with men who tailor garments never knew before that there were different kinds of thimbles for men and women for example a woman's thimble is closed at the end and is worn on a different finger than a taylor symbol which is open and dead so encountering those little stories um looking at the skeletons has been fascinating to try to get a sense of who those people were i've enjoyed very much to try to figure out who they were in life dying on boss is simply the last and least interesting thing they did in their lives the challenge for me as an archaeologist and an historian is to figure out what were their lives like before that moment and what does that tell us so those are those are things i've been looking at recently um that i found fascinating but everything is is potentially interesting i just wrote an article about everything you can learn from a cannonball and there's a surprising amount you can learn from a cannonball we have a thousand of them but yeah they tell you a lot about the iron industry in sweden for example yeah and that's something that that's continued to be an important factor in well regional and european politics of varying degrees all the way through to um up and up to and including the second world war um and i must say as well as you'll know because you were with me at the time but the ship itself is a magnificent site um as viewers will know i've been to victory and i've been to mary rose i've been to warrior i've been to a fair number of museum ships um and okay fair enough i've probably been to portsmouth dockyard so many times oh yeah but still when you come into the hall for the first time and you just see the the sheer presence of the ship when especially when you know how old it is of just how much of a out of time artifact it is it is a it's a really impressive sight um uh even when i've been filming today going around around i think it's especially every time you get a good uh view from the bow or the stern at some height you're immediately struck again by the fact that it's not just it's not just a ship especially in the context of today when a lot of ships kind of look like gigantic rectangular boxes that someone's vaguely shaped abounds turn on to but it is also a it's a work of art it's got lines it flows it looks like someone's actually spent an awful lot of time and money over it as opposed to a lot of mass-produced stuff that we see these days well our our head of marketing because we've been a very successful museum he often gets compliments or awards and that sort of thing for you know what he must be doing a great job as a marketing director and his answer is always the same he said the ship does most of the work it's an impressive object and what makes it impressive is that it's mostly original it's 98 original timber from 1628 it's old it it's largely intact and it's inside a building if it were sitting at the key it wouldn't look nearly as impressive and the building does a really good job of showing it off when you come in the door the building was designed as a it was a it was an architectural competition and the winners designed this design with the purpose in mind of giving you a massive rush when you first come in the door that you are confronted by the ship from the best possible angle when you come in the door and it it never fails to surprise people and i'll be honest when i come in the door in the morning even after 17 years of working here i still get a little thrill every time i see the show yeah and on that i think we'll we'll conclude the interview portion of the video although i suspect given how many times the camera's decided it's reached its half hour and shut itself off this will probably constitute a greater portion of the video um so i'll i'll finish off this pop by saying thank you very much for your time and expertise and uh we will i will get back to filming elsewhere and pry this thing well you'll be glad to know i was successful in my efforts to dislodge the camera from its little perch in the replica part of the great cabin of the vassa without you know damaging precious music museum displays and there was much more filming to do much more looking around the museum to do so this is part two of the ongoing series on the vassa and there are two more parts to look forward to one part we're going to go into a detailed discussion of the capabilities of the artillery of vassa which you can see here again in another replicated portion of the ship and uh then we're going to look a little bit more at what you can see in the museum itself a little bit more about the crew and the context in which the ship existed although obviously you know if you want to get the full experience you do need to go to the museum so i won't be showing you everything because uh that would be cheating but once again obviously many many thanks to dr hocker and the staff at the vassa museum who enabled me to make this trip last year and i hope you've enjoyed it because whether you well whether you have or not there's another two parts to come so i hope you're enjoying it and um we shall see you again in another video that's it for this video thanks for watching if you have a comment or suggestion for a ship to review let us know in the comments below don't forget to comment on the pinned post for dry dock questions

Channel: Drachinifel

Views: 73,133

Keywords: wows, world of warships, Vasa, Baltic War, Vasa Museum, Age of Sail, Sweden, Swedish Navy, Mary Rose, preservation

Id: jH9wjBM7bFE

Length: 48min 26sec (2906 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 23 2021