When two of my friends returned from a late-summer vacation in Stockholm with an idea for a blog post about a 17th century Swedish shipwreck I jumped at the idea. It’s a story, spanning four centuries, that has everything: tragedy, underwater archaeology, perseverance, cultural heritage, 17th century Swedish politics.
Lands End Area, San Francisco, CA
There’s an engraved marker at the top of Copp’s Hill in the North End of Boston not far from my apartment. The marker explains that the hill provided 17th-century colonists with a respite from the “three great annoyances, of woolves, rattle-snakes, and musketos.” Mosquitos may not be so far-fetched, but rattlesnakes and wolves in the North End of Boston? It’s hard to imagine. But ever since I discovered this marker, I’ve wondered what the area looked like when European settlers first arrived.
The current view of downtown from Copp's Hill in the North End of Boston. Note the absence of "woolves and rattle-snakes."
Few human pursuits alter the natural landscape in such a radical way as the act of building cities: waterways are filled in, hills are leveled, rivers are encased in subterranean pipes, buildings are built, demolished, and rebuilt. A quick comparison of a 1775 British military map of Boston and a current map of Boston illustrates the point.
Boston in 1775 (left) and today (right)
Today it’s almost impossible to imagine what many cities looked like before they were cities. But that’s exactly what the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Welikia Project aims to do in New York City. Over more than a decade researchers working on the Project have assembled a massive quantity of data from historical maps and accounts, as well as present-day soil surveys and ecological field work. The goal is to create a digital reconstruction of the ecology and landscape of New York City as it appeared in September 1609 when Henry Hudson sailed into New York Harbor. So far the Welikia Project has recreated the 17th century ecological landscape of Manhattan. You can check out the results of their work in an interactive map overlay. Work on the other four boroughs is ongoing. If you ever find yourself in Manhattan, and are curious about what the island looked like before it was a city, the last vestiges of the original forests and salt marshes that once covered most of Manhattan’s coastline can be found in Inwood Hill Park at the far northern tip of the island.
While Welikia Project researchers have painstakingly recreated a virtual representation of New York City before it was a city, in San Francisco the National Park Service has gone one step further and actually restored the ecological landscape of large sections of the city to its pre-urban state. I visited San Francisco for work a few weeks ago, and luckily I had enough down time to do some exploring. After a long, crowded bus ride across town, and a short walk through Lincoln Park (which turned out to mostly be a golf course) I found myself on the Lands End Trail, which runs along the Pacific coast at the northwest corner of the city. As I walked toward the coast I descended into a dense fog bank which obscured what had been a clear, sunny day just a few hundred yards inland. The landscape was all coastal scrub, pine trees, crashing waves, and rocky outcrops. I was less than half a mile from the densely populated Richmond District neighborhood, but I felt like I’d entered a wilderness area.
Lands End Trail, San Francisco, CA
Walking along the trail I noticed a side trail leading down the hill toward the water. It was the kind of trail that’s just overgrown enough to make you think that maybe you’re not supposed to go down it. But nevertheless the trail is there, which means people must use it semi-regularly, which means there’s probably something cool at the end of it. So needless to say I followed this side trail through some undergrowth and down a steep slope. The trail ended at a deserted rocky beach. It was silent except for the sound of the surf on the rocks and the far-off drone of dueling fog horns. I was completely unprepared to find myself in such a beautiful, wild place – it wasn’t something I’d expected to come across within the city limits of the most densely populated urban area in California. It looked like this:
The section of coastline traversed by the Lands End Trail probably looks similar to the landscape that Spanish explorers encountered when they first arrived in the area in 1769. But it hasn’t always looked this way. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries a railroad ran along the coast, and a massive swimming pool complex called Sutro Baths was built in a cove between the cliffs near what is now the Lands End trailhead. Sutro Baths burned to the ground in 1966, and what remains of the foundations and pools have become part of the natural landscape.
The ruins of Sutro Baths
Over the past several years, the National Park Service has restored the Lands End area by reintroducing native plant species and controlling erosion along the coastal cliffs. The Park Service’s job was made easier by the fact that the natural landscape in the northwestern corner of San Francisco was never completely destroyed. For over 200 years a military base, the Presidio, occupied the area. Access was restricted and large portions of land surrounding the base were left unused and more or less undisturbed. Native plants and animals continued to thrive in these pockets of unused land, even as the city of San Francisco grew and expanded right up to the perimeter of the Presidio. The Presidio was closed in 1994 and the land it occupied was transferred to the National Park Service, which began the process of restoring and expanding areas of primordial coastal landscape.
The Presidio’s impact on San Francisco’s natural landscape, however, was not entirely benign. In the early 20th century, a large salt marsh and beach along the northern edge of the Presidio was filled in and converted to a military airfield called Crissy Field. When the Park Service inherited the area in the mid-90s, Crissy Field was a heavily polluted expanse of crumbling pavement and derelict buildings, but the Crissy Field I visited a few weeks ago was a very different place. I spent an afternoon walking the full length of Crissy Field, past a tidal marsh and drifting sand dunes covered in wildflowers and shrubs. It was an unusually windy day and seabirds shot by overhead, riding the wind gusts, while kids flew kites all along the beach. Because the area is flat, I had amazing views of the Golden Gate Bridge and the Marin Headlands across the bay.
The restoration of Crissy Field was a carefully executed, 34 million dollar project that involved cleaning up contaminated materials, digging an artificial marsh and opening it to the tides of the bay, and planting tens of thousands of native plants among the newly restored dunes. After clean-up and landscape construction was completed, the Park Service took a hands off approach to the area’s ecological restoration, waiting for wildlife to return and native plants to spread and grow unimpeded.
Restored sand dunes along Crissy Field
The Park Service’s ecological restoration work in San Francisco has largely been a success, and this kind of urban ecosystem restoration has become increasingly popular in cities around the world. But is it a good idea? There are definitely some major benefits. Restored areas provide habitat for wildlife as well as a natural buffer from storms and flooding. Native plant life can even help control air pollution, and the native plants tend to look out for themselves, so the landscapes require minimal energy and resources to maintain. Restored ecosystems can also provide city dwellers, especially children, with a more authentic experience in nature than might otherwise be available to them. At the same time not everyone is a fan. US Department of Agriculture social scientist Paul Gobster has argued that ecological restoration emphasizes the health and diversity of natural ecosystems at the expense of human use of the land. By turning back the clock of a landscape to a time before it was settled, restoration projects can erase the human, cultural history of a place. And access to restored landscapes may be restricted to control erosion and protect fragile plant life, preventing residents of surrounding neighborhoods from fully enjoying the space.
Crissy Field, San Francisco, CA
As I wandered around the Lands End area in San Francisco, I noticed a number of roped off areas with signs explaining that landscape restoration was ongoing. But as I walked through Crissy Field I couldn’t help but notice that the beautifully restored natural landscape was balanced with plenty of open space and beaches for dog-walking, frisbee-playing, jogging, and all kinds of other recreational activities. There’s even a restored, grassy airfield that recalls the area’s historical roots. Because restored ecological landscapes like the Lands End area and Crissy Field are located within densely populated areas, project planners and park managers need to find ways to balance the needs and desires of city residents with a desire to maintain a pristine ecosystem.
References and Further Reading
Boston’s Urban Wilds Initiative works to preserve pockets of natural landscape in the city.
Gobster, P. (2007). Urban Park Restoration and the “Museumification” of Nature Nature and Culture, 2 (2), 95-114 DOI: 10.3167/nc2007.020201
Boland, Michael (2004). Crissy Field: A New Model for Managing Urban Parklands Places, 15 (3), 40-43
Feb 152012
There aren’t many foods that are as closely tied to American identity as apple pie. And, despite a contrarian article published last summer in Slate titled “Pie: It’s Gloppy, It’s Soggy, It’s Un-American”, Americans love apple pie so much that, at times, we’ve felt compelled to make it even when we don’t have any apples. I’ve heard about a recipe for apple-less apple pie from a number of people over the years, but I’ve never talked to anyone who’s actually eaten it. So this past weekend, I decided to give it a try.
Mock apple pie, or chemical apple pie as it is less-appetizingly known, is defined by three main ingredients: crackers, sugar, and cream of tartar. When these three ingredients are mixed and soaked in hot water, the resulting mushy cracker mixture is supposed to taste something like apples. I was skeptical. But as I stood over a boiling pot of slowly dissolving Ritz crackers, I thought I caught a faint whiff of apple. Maybe. It was an apple-ish smell anyway. I didn’t have any pie crust on hand and didn’t have the patience to make my own, so I settled for making a mock apple crisp. I poured my cracker filling into a baking dish and topped it with cinnamon and a mixture of flour, oats, sugar, and butter, and baked the whole mess for half an hour at 350 degrees.
For the sake of comparison, I also made a real apple crisp using actual apples. When the two crisps came out of the oven, the mock apple crisp looked a lot like the real thing. It was the right color and smelled like cinnamon with maybe even a hint of apple. On closer inspection, the filling was more uniform and gelatinous than the real apple filling, but it looked more or less the same. So far, so good. When I took a bite it tasted sweet and cinnamony, with a mild apple flavor – kind of like an overly sweet, bland apple crisp. I’m not really selling it here, but it actually wasn’t bad. It tasted less like mushy crackers and more like apple crisp than I expected it would anyway. But when I followed it up with a bite of real apple crisp, the mock crisp paled in comparison. It lacked the tartness and flavor of real apples.
So how does it work? What makes a cracker pie filling taste like apples? Some focused googling failed to produce a definitive answer to this question, but a few possible explanations did turn up. Some people seem to think that cream of tartar is the secret ingredient responsible for the apple flavor. Cream of tartar (no relation to tartar sauce) is the potassium salt of tartaric acid, an organic acid that’s found in a lot of fruit, including apples. Because it’s also found in grapes, tartaric acid is present in most wines and often crystallizes on wine corks. When people who know about such things talk about a wine’s acidity, they’re mostly talking about the tartaric acid content. Tartaric acid (and cream of tartar) is sometimes used in cooking to impart a tart, sour flavor. And that’s probably the purpose it serves in the mock apple pie recipe as well. Even though apples contain tartaric acid, it’s not primarily responsible for the fruit’s distinct flavor. Another very similar organic acid found in apples, called malic acid, is more commonly associated with a tart, apple flavor (it’s name is even derived from malum, Latin for apple). Although malic acid is added to lots of foods these days as a flavoring agent and preservative, it doesn’t appear in the traditional mock apple pie recipe, probably because it wasn’t widely available when the recipe was developed. But more on that later. If someone were really serious about making a better-tasting fake apple pie, they might try using malic acid instead of cream of tartar.
Another possible explanation is that the mock pie doesn’t taste much like apples at all, we’re just tricked into thinking it does. It’s sweet, it’s buttery, it smells like cinnamon, it has a crust (or in my case an oatmeal topping), it looks just like an apple pie. So our brains fill in the missing piece – the taste and smell of apples. This isn’t as strange as it sounds. It turns out that visual cues are more important to our sense of taste than you might expect. In a 1980 study of the relationship between color and taste perception, researchers found that study participants had trouble correctly identifying the flavor of fruit-flavored drinks when the the drinks were inappropriately colored. For instance, when a cherry-flavored drink was colored green, 26% of participants thought that it tasted like lemon/lime, but when it was colored red, everyone thought it tasted like cherry. A problem with this study was that the participants were not aware that the flavors and colors of their drinks were mismatched, and so may have relied on color when they weren’t exactly sure about their drink’s flavor. But in follow-up studies participants were told up front that the color of the drinks they were tasting had nothing to do with the flavor, and they still had a hard time correctly identifying the flavor of inappropriately colored drinks. One widely accepted interpretation of these results is that a food’s color (and more generally, it’s appearance) sets up a largely unconscious expectation of what the food will taste like. This expectation can be so strong that it actually influences how we perceive the taste of the food – sort of like a gustatory placebo effect. Something similar may be going on when we eat mock apple pie.
When I told my mom, who’d heard of the recipe before but never tried it, that I was making a mock apple pie, her response was, “Yuck. I never understood why anyone would want to make an apple pie out of crackers.” This seems to be a pretty common response. So who were these people who invented an apple-less apple pie? It turns out that the recipe is much older than you might expect. It dates back at least as far as the mid-19th century. As pioneers settled across the American West, they found themselves without access to apples, which aren’t native to the region. Craving the apple pie they were used to eating back east, some resourceful pioneers came up with a substitute pie made out of soda crackers. There’s a recipe for a cracker-based mock apple pie titled “California Pioneer Apple Pie, 1852” in the 1894 cookbook, How We Cook in Los Angeles. During the Civil War, apples, which were imported from New England before the war, became scarce in the South. So in 1863, a recipe for “Apple Pie Without the Apples” appeared in the Confederate Receipt Book: “To one small bowl of crackers, that have been soaked until no hard parts remain, add one teaspoonful of tartaric acid, sweeten to your taste, add some butter, and a very little nutmeg.” Decades later, there was a resurgence in popularity of the mock apple pie during the Great Depression, when apples became prohibitively expensive for many Americans. It was at this time that Ritz crackers capitalized on the recipe’s popularity by printing it on their boxes. The original Ritz recipe is still available online today.
There’s an impressive amount of history and psychology behind the mock apple pie. But as I ate my mock apple crisp, I couldn’t help thinking that I’d probably never make it again. It’s not that it tasted bad, just that I’d rather make a real apple crisp if I’m going to put in the effort. But if you want to try some mock apple pie for yourself, the recipe I used was adapted from this recipe at Allrecipes.com.
References and Further Reading
Ritz Mock Apple Pie – An Old Time Favorite from the Seattle Times
Food Timeline for Mock Apple Pie
Spence, C., Levitan, C., Shankar, M., & Zampini, M. (2010). Does Food Color Influence Taste and Flavor Perception in Humans? Chemosensory Perception, 3 (1), 68-84 DOI: 10.1007/s12078-010-9067-z
Dec 062011
The royal coat of arms on the stern of the Vasa. Image: Yifan Luo
This is Part 2 of A True Tale of Maritime Loss and Redemption. Read Part 1 here.
After the Vasa was salvaged from the bottom of Stockholm harbor nearly intact in 1961 and towed to a dry dock, archaeologists were some of the first people to board the resurrected ship. They squeezed through the Vasa’s cramped quarters and slogged through three-foot-deep mud on the lower decks, searching for artifacts. They quickly began to uncover thousands of objects: coins, bowls, cups, elegant furniture, a board game, a butter cask containing 333-year-old butter. Like a nautical Pompeii, everything was as it had been on the day the Vasa sank. Archaeologists found the ship fully provisioned for a months-long maiden voyage, with casks of salted meat and musket shot stored in the hold. Crew members’ chests, still carefully packed with folded clothes and personal items, were a poignant reminder of the human scale of the tragedy. And as archaeologists sifted through the mud they encountered the calcified skeletons of the crew members themselves who had perished with the ship, some of them still dressed in the shoes and clothes they wore on the last day of their lives. The remains of one unfortunate sailor were found pinned beneath a loose gun carriage.
Together with historical records, the archaeological excavation of the Vasa painted an unpleasant picture of life aboard a 17th-century warship. Most of the Vasa’s crew were conscripts from seaside towns in Sweden. They were poorly paid and were forced to provide most of their own clothing and provisions for their long tours of duty. Sailors lived a meager existence while at sea, subsisting on rations of bread, porridge, salted meat or fish, and ale. Day-to-day life aboard 17th-century, Swedish warships was filled with routine and tedium, but the naval battles of the time were horrific: they often began with hot, smoky artillery barrages and careful maneuvering of the engaged ships, but inevitably progressed to bloody hand-to-hand combat as the crew of one ship boarded the other.
The stern of the Vasa as it appears today. Image: Yifan Luo
As archaeologists excavated the Vasa’s gun deck, where the ship’s 400 sailors would have eaten, slept, socialized, and fought and died in battle, they found homemade clothing, cheap eating utensils, and a small box containing a lock of a woman’s hair. In the admiral’s room and officers’ quarters at the rear of the ship, archaeologists uncovered ornate furniture, painted sculptures, and countless luxury items. The sharp differences between the objects left behind by the ship’s officers and crew illustrate the drastic social inequality present in Swedish society at the time.
While archaeologists excavated the Vasa’s lower decks and hold, a team of conservators began the immense task of reassembling and preserving the Vasa and the objects found within it. The Vasa was mostly complete when it was found, but portions of the ship had collapsed and some of the exterior sculptures had fallen off of the hull. There were no plans or blueprints of the Vasa for conservators to consult as they reconstructed the ship. Instead, they assembled the loose pieces like a giant jigsaw puzzle, using the original nail holes as guides. As fragments were gradually reattached using steel wire, the sculptures and ornaments decorating the Vasa’s exterior became visible in their original context for the first time in over three centuries. After conservators had finished reattaching over 13,500 fragments, the ship was more than 95% complete.
The Vasa's upper deck. Image: Yifan Luo
Because a waterlogged wooden structure as large as the Vasa had never been preserved before, the preservation of the Vasa was a risky, pioneering endeavor. When the Vasa came to rest at the bottom of Stockholm harbor in 1628, it began a centuries-long process of adjusting to its new surroundings. The wooden hull steadily absorbed water until it was saturated; the metal portions of the ship, including the nails that held it together, corroded in the brackish water, while the bright paint covering the ship’s ornate sculptures slowly discolored, cracked, and flaked away. Fortunately for the Vasa, the cold, almost oxygen-free waters of Stockholm harbor are inhospitable to many of the microbes and animals that could have done the most damage to the wreck. In particular the shipworm, which isn’t a worm at all, but a sort of clam that burrows into wooden structures and has been known to make short work of shipwrecks and wooden piers alike, cannot survive in the harbor. Even so, there was enough microbial growth on the sunken ship to degrade the outer 3/4 of an inch of all wooden surfaces. This meant that the Vasa appeared outwardly intact when it was discovered, but was actually incredibly fragile on a microscopic level.
After the Vasa was removed from the cold harbor waters, it immediately began to dry out. If it dried too quickly conservators knew that the timbers of the hull could shrink and crack and that degraded areas of wood could collapse. In order to preserve the structural integrity of the ship as it dried, they needed to replace the mass and volume of the lost water with a more stable substance. They chose a synthetic wax called polyethylene glycol. For 17 years the Vasa sat in a dark warehouse where it was sprayed almost continuously with increasingly concentrated solutions of polyethylene glycol, which gradually soaked into the hull, displacing the seawater. After the polyethylene glycol had displaced hundreds of tons of water from the ship, the relative humidity in the storage warehouse was slowly decreased, allowing the Vasa to gradually dry over a period of nine years.
By the late 1980’s the Vasa was stable enough to be moved to a new museum where it could be displayed permanently. In 1988, it was towed into a flooded dry dock and the new Vasa museum was built around it. The museum was completed and opened to the public in 1990. Although conservators had addressed the immediate danger of the Vasa cracking or collapsing as it dried, the ship’s long-term, public display presented them with new challenges. By the time the Vasa was first moved to the museum, it had dried out quite a bit, but the water content of the wood was still high. In order to prevent further degradation and to minimize mold and bacterial growth on the damp ship, it needed to be stored at a very specific temperature and relative humidity. To meet this need, the Vasa museum was designed as a giant, carefully controlled display case that visitors enter through air locks.
The exterior of the Vasa Museum. Image: Yifan Luo
During the unusually humid summer of 2000, museum conservators were startled to suddenly find patches of yellowy-white powder emerging from many wooden surfaces on the Vasa, as though the ship had come down with an unpleasant skin condition. Chemical analysis of the powder revealed that it was made up of a variety of sulfur-containing salts, mostly sulfates. Where did this sulfur come from? For most of the 333 years that the Vasa spent underwater, Stockholm harbor was so polluted that the ship absorbed a significant amount of sulfides from the water. After the Vasa was salvaged, these sulfides reacted with oxygen and moisture in the air, as well as iron that had leeched into the the wood as the original nails and bolts corroded, to form large quantities of sulfuric acid and yellow-white iron sulfate salts. If sulfuric acid continued to form unabated, it threatened to liquify portions of the Vasa and some of the wooden objects found within it. Conservators chose to manage this problem by carefully controlling the environment surrounding the ship. Sensors in and around the ship showed that the museum’s temperature and humidity had varied beyond the predetermined range during the summer of 2000 which triggered the formation of sulfates and acid. So, the museum’s elaborate climate control system was upgraded in 2004 to ensure that it could maintain the optimal temperature and humidity levels even as thousands of warm, breathing visitors enter the museum every day. By managing the temperature and relative humidity of the museum, conservators were able to reduce the formation of acid, but the ship’s high acid content is still a major concern today.
The preservation and display of the Vasa remains one of the largest, ongoing conservation projects in the world. Today it’s one of Sweden’s most treasured pieces of cultural heritage. It draws thousands of tourists to Sweden every year, and for Swedes it recalls an era of Swedish regional dominance and a romanticized past. When the Vasa was completed 383 years ago, it was a potent symbol of Swedish nationalism, and its loss was deeply damaging to Sweden’s national pride. It took well over three centuries, but, fittingly, the Vasa has reassumed its original position as a symbol of national pride.
References and Further Reading
Learn more about the Vasa, and how to visit it if you ever find yourself in Stockholm, at the Vasa Museum website.
This past summer divers located what they believe is the shipwreck of Mars, a 16th century Swedish warship and the Vasa’s predecessor. Mars sank in 1564 during a naval battle with Denmark in the Baltic Sea.
Matz, Erling. Vasa. Published by the Vasa Museum. 2009
Hocker, Emma (2010). Maintaining a Stable Environment: “Vasa’s” New Climate-Control System Association for Preservation Technology International Bulletin, 41 (2/3), 3-9
Special thanks to Yifan Luo for providing the images for this post, and to Gregory Bailey for providing information and sources about the conservation of the Vasa.
This is part 1 of A True Tale of Maritime Loss and Redemption in Two Parts
The Vasa was a biblically proportioned warship, 226 feet long and 172 feet high, constructed in Sweden from a thousand oak trees during the early part of the 17th century. It carried 64 cannons and was covered bow to stern in garish, brightly-painted sculptures of lions, cherubs, mermaids, warriors and too many other ornaments and figures to list here. It was a masterwork of Renaissance extravagance and military exhibitionism. And it sank as soon as it set sail for the first time.
The send-off for the Vasa was a ceremonial affair. It was a balmy, late-summer day in Stockholm and throngs of people had gathered around the harbor to watch the hulking warship set off on its maiden voyage. The ship had to be pulled through a sheltered part of the harbor using a series of anchors before it could raise its sails and get under way. As the ship maneuvered around an island and into an open stretch of harbor, the crew climbed into the rigging and raised four of the Vasa’s ten sails. No sooner were the sails raised than the winds of misfortune picked up, filling the sails and tipping the ship precariously to one side. For a moment the Vasa seemed to right itself and for a moment the hundred odd crew members, the families they had brought aboard for this special occasion, and the crowds watching from the shore must have breathed a collective sigh of relief. But then the winds of misfortune blew harder still, pushing the Vasa clear over. Seawater rushed in through the open gun ports, and witnesses watched helplessly from the shore as the largest ship many of them had ever seen disappeared beneath the placid waters of the harbor in slow motion.
And that was that. The Vasa capsized and sank on a bright, calm day after traveling less than a mile through Stockholm harbor, an absolute fiasco to say the least. Records indicate that around fifty people drowned during the tragedy, and these poor souls had hardly drawn their last breaths before a royal inquiry into the disaster began. The captain of the Vasa was immediately taken into custody. Had he been drunk during the Vasa’s short voyage? Were members of the crew drunk? The captain swore that neither he nor his crew had been intoxicated, and his testimony was corroborated by interviews with crew members. Who, then, was responsible for the loss of the Vasa? As far as the captain could tell, the ship was simply too top-heavy; its design was flawed. When the ship builder was questioned along these lines, he responded that the ship had been built according to measurements approved by the King himself. And that seems to have been the end of the matter – ultimately no one was punished.
Perhaps the inquiry was dropped because the King and his court simply didn’t want to draw any more attention to the incident. Sweden had pinned its national pride on the Vasa, so when it sank, the kingdom lost more than an expensive warship. In the early 17th century, Sweden was considerably more war-like than the neutral Sweden of today. When the Vasa was completed in 1628 the Swedes had recently defeated an invading Russian army, were at war with Poland, had fought on-again off-again wars with Denmark for decades, and were considering entering the Thirty Years War in Germany on the Protestant side. The Vasa was a crucial part of Sweden’s plan to assert naval control over the Baltic Sea, and its construction was followed anxiously by neighboring nations. So when the Vasa sank within sight of the shipyard where it was built, it was a deeply embarrassing, international spectacle.
Illustration of a diving bell
Records from the time show that the Vasa’s untimely end may not have been entirely unexpected. Before the Vasa set sail for the first time, a group of thirty men ran back and forth across the deck in unison, tipping the ship from side to side to test its stability. After the men had run across the deck three times they were forced to stop because the ship was dangerously close to capsizing, even though it was safely moored in the harbor. The King was traveling abroad at the time, but a naval admiral witnessed the test and did nothing to delay the ship’s maiden voyage, possibly because he didn’t want to disappoint the King who was eager to see the Vasa join his Baltic naval fleet. If nothing else, the Admiral’s inaction reassures us that willful ignorance in the face of an obvious, potentially catastrophic problem isn’t a phenomenon that’s restricted to present-day politicians.
In the years after the Vasa sank there was a lot of interest in salvaging the ship’s cannons, which were made of bronze and were the most valuable part of the ship. For 36 years a series of enterprising individuals tried and failed to retrieve the cannons from the bottom of Stockholm harbor. And then in 1664 two men named Albreckt von Treileben and Andreas Peckell who had previous experience salvaging valuables from shipwrecks succeeded where others had failed. They used a diving bell, which was the most advanced diving equipment available at the time. As the name suggests, it’s a large metal bell that traps a pocket of air as it is lowered into the water, providing an air supply for a diver. The divers worked to extract the cannons from the wreck in the pitch-black, frigid waters of the harbor for up to 30 minutes at a time. Despite such abominable conditions, von Treileben, Peckell and their team of divers managed to raise more than 50 of the Vasa’s 64 cannons over the course of a year.
Once the cannons had been salvaged, people more or less forgot about the Vasa. By the early 1950’s no one was even sure exactly where the shipwreck was. And then in 1956, after a quixotic, five-year quest for the wreck, an amateur historian and archaeologist named Anders Franzen found it just off of the island of Beckholmen near the center of Stockholm.
Despite spending well over 300 years underwater, the ship was remarkably intact. Of course the rigging and other perishable parts of the ship had deteriorated and the sterncastle, or rear portion of the ship, had entirely collapsed, but overall the ship’s hull appeared so complete that someone decided the entire ship should be resurrected and raised to the surface. And with that, an intrepid, five-year-long effort to salvage the Vasa began. Divers dug six tunnels through the mucky harbor floor beneath the Vasa and strung steel cables through the tunnels. The cables were connected to pontoons, which, when inflated, lifted the wreck. In this way the Vasa was gradually raised into shallower waters over the course of several small lifts. Finally in 1961, after the gun ports and other holes in the hull had been patched and sealed underwater, the Vasa was lifted to the surface and was able to float unaided. The Vasa had emerged from the depths of Stockholm harbor into the 20th century, but even as it was towed to a nearby dry dock, the timbers of its hull were in danger of cracking as they dried, and several feet of mud covered the lower decks, concealing artifacts hastily abandoned as the ship sank 333 years earlier.
Will the Vasa be preserved? What will archaeologists find below deck? Read the dramatic conclusion here.
 Clues to Copper’s PastOur past relationship with copper was dramatically brought to light, quite literally, on a bright autumn day twenty years ago when two tourists hiking in the Tyrolean Alps stumbled upon a desiccated corpse protruding from a receding glacier. |
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 Buried Alive!A fear of being buried alive was a Victorian fixation, but were people actually buried alive? |
Bless This MessSmells Like Science is turning one year old this month, and in honor of the anniversary I’ve decided to make some changes to the blog’s layout. |
