Vasa (ship) - Construction

Construction

Shortly before Vasa was ordered, work at the Stockholm shipyard was led by Antonius Monier, with Dutch-born Henrik Hybertsson as hired shipbuilder. On 16 January 1625, Henrik and his brother, Arendt Hybertsson (de Groote), took over the shipyard and soon signed a contract to build four ships, two larger with a keel of around 41 meters (135 ft) and two smaller of 33 meters (108 feet).

After a few years, the shipyard ran into economic problems, delaying the construction of the contracted ships. At the same time, the Swedish navy lost 10 ships in a single storm, and the king sent a worried letter to Admiral Klas Fleming, asking him to make sure that Henrik hurried the construction of the two smaller ships. Along with the letter, the king sent measurements for the ship, which was to have a keel of 37 meters (120 ft). That gave Henrik Hybertsson new problems, because the measurements ordered by the king fell between those of the larger and smaller vessels in the original contract, and the timber had already been cut. In a new letter, on 22 February 1626, the king again demanded that his measurements for the new ship be followed. Hybertsson never saw Vasa completed; he fell ill in late 1625, one year into construction, and died in the spring of 1627. The supervision of the shipbuilding was given to Hybertsson's assistant, Henrik 'Hein' Jacobsson, also a Dutch immigrant.

Vasa's hull was complete enough to be launched in 1627, probably during the spring. After this, work most likely began on finishing the upper deck, the sterncastle, the beakhead and the rigging. Sweden had still not developed a sizeable sailcloth industry, and material had to be ordered from abroad, some from France but also from Germany and the Low Countries. The sails were made mostly of hemp and partly of flax. The rigging was made entirely of hemp imported from Latvia through Riga. The king visited the shipyard in January 1628 and made what was probably his only visit aboard the ship.

In the summer of 1628, the captain responsible for supervising construction of the ship, Söfring Hansson, arranged for the ship’s stability to be demonstrated for the Vice Admiral responsible for procurement, Klas Fleming, who had recently arrived in Stockholm from Prussia. Thirty men ran back and forth across the upper deck to start the ship rolling, but the admiral stopped the test after they had made only three trips, as he feared the ship would capsize. According to testimony by the ship’s master, Göran Mattson, Fleming remarked that he wished the king were at home. Gustavus Adolphus had been sending a steady stream of letters insisting that the ship put to sea as soon as possible.

There has been much speculation that Vasa was lengthened during construction and whether an additional gun deck was added late during the build or not. Little evidence suggests that Vasa was substantially modified after the keel was laid. Ships contemporary to Vasa that were elongated were cut in half and new timbers spliced between the existing sections, making the addition readily identifiable, but no such addition can be identified in the hull. Claims about the addition of a second gun deck are harder to refute, but significant evidence exists against it. The king ordered 72 24-pound cannon for the ship on 5 August 1626, and this was too many to fit on a single gun deck. Since the king's order was issued less than five months after construction started, it would have come early enough for the second deck to be included in the design. The French Galion du Guise, the ship used as a model for Vasa, according to Arendt Hybertsson, also had two gun decks. Laser measurements of Vasa's structure conducted 2007-2011 confirmed that no major changes were implemented during construction, but that the center of gravity was too high.

Vasa was one of the earliest examples of a warship with two full gun decks, and was built when the theoretic principles of shipbuilding were still poorly understood. The safety margins at the time were also far below anything that would be acceptable today. Combined with the fact that 17th century warships were built with intentionally high superstructures (to be used as firing platforms), this made the Vasa a risky undertaking.