Today was an amazingly busy day in Stockholm. I needed to cross town at lunchtime and the traffic along Vallhallavägen was unbelievable. I expected long queues at Strandvägen (where I was heading) but not here around Karlaplan. As we sat fuming in the car, stressing about whether we would EVER get to our appointment, it hit me that of course, it was studenten time and the city was being taken over by parades of high school kids celebrating graduation, much as my step-daughter did last year. I can't get upset by that as I figure you are only young once and I rather like the whole concept, so I relaxed a little and we merely chose an enormous detour around the city to get to our destination.

Our lunchtime goal was Vasa Museum on Djurgården. We even managed to smuggle Lambi into the museum, inside our backpack. I have not been here before, despite the fact that it is the most visited tourist site in Sweden. The entire museum is devoted to the preservation and display of a seventeenth century warship - the mighty Regalskeppet Vasa.



She really is an imposing sight. Her dimensions are:

Length, including the bowsprit: 69m (226 ft.)
Max width: 11.7 m (38 ft.)
Max. height: 19m (62 ft.)
Draught: 4.8 m (15 ft. 9 in)
Displacement: 1,210 tons
The VASA had 10 sails, six have been preserved, 64 cannons (3 preserved), and could hold approx. 450 men 300 of which were soldiers.

The story behind the ship is really interesting. She was commissioned by the king of Sweden, Gustav II Adolf in 1625. She was to be greater than any ship ever built at that time and the king himself dictated the Vasa's measurements (no one dared argue against him). It had two gun decks and held sixty-four bronze cannons. Various woods were used but mostly northern oak – a very sturdy wood. It is said that a total of 40 acres (16 ha) of timber was used to build her (and I can well believe it).



The ornate carvings you see here, were made separately in workshops and later attached to the bow and around the high stern castle. The stern ornaments (painted red, gold, blue) were carved gods, demons, kings, knights, warriors, cherubs, mermaids, weird animal shapes – all meant to both scare the enemies and also symbolise power, courage and cruelty. There are over seven hundred individual carved figures decorating the hull. The ship was painted in Baroque colours. They are still researching exactly how she was painted and the coloured carvings you see here are but a small example of the probable colour scheme.

The stern castle (that's the back of the boat, by the way) is an artistic masterpiece (note, this would have been painted and gilded at the time):



Despite such immense proportions and painstaking details and carvings, Vasa took only three years to build and when completed in 1628, she was both a floating work of art and a formidable weapon of war. Despite Sweden having a population of only one and a half million people, she was a dominating naval power and this ship was part of a grand plan to maintain Swedish power in the Baltic against the threatened attack by the Habsburg Empire of Charles V.



Up at the bow of the ship, we discovered where boats get the name for their toilets. I was always puzzled about why a ship's toilet was referred to as "the heads". It is a name that makes no sense to me and I never really knew how they acquired that odd nomenclature - until today. The very front of the ship is also called the beak-head. And the toilets were located right up front on the bow-sprit (that's the big pointy thing sticking out of the front of the boat). In the following picture, you can see a box-like structure on the lower right hand side (follow the yellow arrow). Well that, believe it or not, is the toilet! Not very comfortable, private, hygenic or environmentally friendly. And one of only two toilets on the whole ship (for a crew of 450!!). And I thought the women's toilet queues at nightclubs was long.



Anyway, because of its location at the beakhead, the toilet began to be called "the heads". And apparently in rough weather or when the boat was listing, it was a dangerous place to be.

"So what happened to this mighty warship, pride of the Swedish fleet" I hear you ask. Well, that is rather a good story as well. Vasa began her maiden voyage on August 10th 1628 from Skeppsbron. Thousands of Stockholmers gathered on the shore to admire the magnificent ship on its first voyage. She set her sails, but had only sailed for less than a nautical mile before she capsized. Apparently, there was a sudden squall and her gun ports were still open (having just fired a farewell to the king). She listed heavily to port in the wind, the gun ports sank below water level and water gushed in. It took only a few moments for her to sink. (This is very similar to what happened years earlier with the Mary Rose, an English vessel, sunk in 1545.) Vasa sank to 30 metres below the surface of the harbor and about 100 metres from the shore. No record of the finding of the court of inquiry, set up immediately after the disaster of her launching, has ever come to light. So the Swedish public service learned how to lose reports centuries before the Australian Public Service :)

If she HAD sailed, Vasa would have looked like this:



She lay at the bottom of the harbour for the next 330 years, before being rediscovered and salvaged in a mammoth operation by maritime historian Anders Franzén.

It was a really interesting visit. I've seen replica ships before when I visited the Dutch East Indiaman Amsterdam at Scheepvaartmuseum in Holland and the Cutty Sark at Greenwich in London a few years ago. Both of those were impressive, but nothing on the scale and magnificence of Vasa. And Vasa is not a replica. She is the original ship - almost 400 years old!

It still blows my mind that she was afloat long before Australia was even thought of by Europeans. We really are a young nation when you think in terms of the history of a place like Stockholm.