Understanding Seventeenth Century Maritime Culture: Current Research on the Swedish Warship Vasa of 1628

DOCUMENT Citation Only Allison N Miller Simonds.

When Vasa sank in 1628, approximately 30 lives were lost. Through the course of the excavation of the ship in the 1950s and 1960s, over 1,500 human bones were recorded and cataloged, which are currently believed to represent 15 individuals. The human remains have been the subject of osteological, odontological, and DNA analyses, though none of these studies have taken into account their archaeological context. This research provides the first complete archaeological analysis of the human remains...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Diane Smeeks.

Countless studies have been conducted in reference to shipboard life.  Historians have often considered the daily diaries, journals, and correspondences of the individuals who partook of this lifestyle.  Meanwhile, archaeologists have considered personal chests of seamen, officers’ cabins, and personal materials scattered across wrecks, but few have considered personal property found with skeletal remains.  The reason for this lack of investigation is the preservation of materials.  Vasa is an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen R Boyle.

The Vasa was designed to be an extension of the King’s court. This would mean that the court structure would be transferred to the Vasa itself when at sea with the King on board. Although a big ship for the time, transferring a full court system with all the accompanying entourage to the Vasa would lead to a very complicated social structure in a surprisingly small area. The Great Cabin, the officers cabin, the decks where the crew slept, ate and socialised as well as the hold where the ships...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cecilia Aneer.

In 2017 a project centering on the textile finds from the warship Vasa was started. Its aim is to document, analyze, contextualize, interpret and publish the approximately 300 textile fragments from the personal belongings of the ship’s crew. The finds show a large variety both in state of preservation and in the materials and techniques represented.  The Vasa Textiles Project is set up as a collaboration between the Vasa museum and the unit for Textile studies at Uppsala university. The first...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nathaniel F Howe.

Rigging blocks are essential to the operation of a large sailing vessel, yet little has been published on these vital pieces of hardware. Recent research and analysis of the rigging and gun tackle blocks found in association with the Swedish royal warship, Vasa, lost in Stockholm Harbor in 1628,has made possible a detailed study of this specialized equipment, its typology, nomenclature, historical development, physical mechanics, and its application aboard 17th century square-rigged ships....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anne Carlhem.

Sweden has rich natural resources: timber, iron, copper, with established transport/trade routes, over land and water, from Viking times. Lightly populated-sufficient labor to extract these resources was a problem. Swedish timber was coveted due to slow growth rate when compared to other countries. Oak was valuable and protected by royal proclamation. The Thirty Years War meant the loss of half of the able-bodied men in Sweden. This caused an increase of women/widows taking on patriarchal roles...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nathaniel R King.

A Swedish researcher wrote in 2014 that a group of artifacts found on Vasa belonged to the ship's barber. These artifacts included, a whisk, wooden ladles, a wooden mortar and pestle, a grater, a beer tap, a pewter flask, and a stoneware jar.  The barber surgeon is perhaps the most important crew member a ship can have.  A ship's barber surgeon was responsible for the treatment of diseases and injuries while the vessel is at sea, at times having to act as surgeon, physician, and apothecary,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John E Ratcliffe.

The casks from Vasa exhibit features infrequently observed in other collections of archaeological cooperage, including distinctive square holes at their midsections, heads that are made of only two to four edge-joined pieces, and evenly spaced bands of hoops. In contrast, Iberian and French cooperage typically exhibits exclusively circular bungholes, heads made of five or six pieces reinforced with a bar, and hoops clustered at opposite ends of the cask. The square-holed Vasa casks were made of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephanie Gandulla.

With the raising of the Vasa came thousands of artifacts, including various examples of treenware, or wooden tableware. From the collection it is clear: although the sailors aboard did not actually have time to eat a meal on that fateful first cruise, they were indeed equipped to do so.  There are 174 artifacts in Vasa’s treenware collection, that represent at least 27 different styles in both carved and turned woodcraft technology. This paper offers a detailed description and accounting of each...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Björn J Gornik.

The Vasa faunal material of a little over 3000 bones offers the opportunity to analyze the spacial distribution within the ship, showing the main provision storage in the hold and spots of presumably personal food at the upper gundeck as well as some smaller bone assemblages from the provision of special groups. All bones were, if possible, identified with taxa, skeletal element and side. The bones from the major contexts were measured after van den Driesch 1976, showing a dominant amount of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only S J Elgar.

-          The 18th [January], purchased Matz Erich[sson] and [Bengt] Joen[sson], 166 baskets of straw in Broschön for – 6 [Daler], 15 [Öre], and 12 [Penningar] -          …On the fourteenth on the same month, [unspecified] purchased glue - 12 [Öre] -          …On the seventh of January 1626, Master Johann took with him to Småland - 1000 [Daler] Entries such as these make up the bulk of the Stockholm Naval account books for the years 1625 and 26. Naval-yard’s administrative systems. This was a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fred Hocker.

When the Swedish warship Vasa  sailed on its ill-fated maiden voyage in 1628, it was probably the most heavily-armed warship in the world, with a total broadside of over 300 kg. In 2013, the Vasa Museum constructed a replica of one of the guns, a 24-pounder demi-cannon. This was test fired 54 times in order to assess range, accuracy, effect and ergonomic aspects of this type of early modern ordnance as part of a larger project to investigate the tactical capability of 17th-centry warships....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aoife M Daly.

Purchase records show that timber for the building of Vasa was bought in Småland (Sweden’s eastern region), Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) and Amsterdam. Extensive dendrochronological/dendroprovenance analysis is currently underway of the timber of Vasa, to determine the provenance of the trees used, to find out: How much timber was brought to Stockholm for Vasa from these different sources and where were they used in the ship? Which timbers came from Småland, and what proportion of the timber...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karolina Pallin. Leticia Pinheiro Lima.

When Vasa was built, it was decorated with numerous sculptures that presented ideas and beliefs on the importance of Sweden and the person of the King. One of the more intriguing, but until today little researched sculptures is the mascaron that sits above the bearings for the ship’s whipstaff. From the grotesque mouth of the sculpture, the whipstaff protrudes like a 4-meter-long tongue. Based on the intricate nature of the carving, and its unique location, the whipstaff mascaron possesses a...