Vasa (ship) - Vasa As A Wreck

Vasa As A Wreck

Less than three days after the disaster, a contract was put out for the ship to be raised. However, those efforts were unsuccessful. The earliest attempts at raising Vasa by English engineer Ian Bulmer resulted in righting the ship somewhat to starboard but also got it more securely stuck in the mud and was most likely one of the biggest impediments to the earliest attempts at recovery. Salvaging technology in the early 17th century was much more primitive than today, but the recovery of ships used roughly the same principles as were used to raise Vasa more than 300 years later. Two ships or hulks were placed parallel to either side above the wreck, and ropes attached to several anchors were sent down and hooked to the ship. The two hulks were filled with as much water as was safe, the ropes tightened, and the water pumped out. The sunken ship then rose with the ships on the surface and could be towed to shallower waters. The process was then repeated until the entire ship was successfully raised above water level. Even if the underwater weight of Vasa was not great, the mud in which it had settled made it sit more secure on the bottom and required considerable lifting power to overcome. More than 30 years after the ship's sinking, in 1664, Albreckt von Treileben and Andreas Peckell mounted an effort to recover the valuable guns. With a simple diving bell, the team of Swedes and Germans retrieved more than 50 of them.

Such activity waned when it became clear that the ship could not be raised by the technology of the time. However, Vasa did not fall completely into obscurity after the recovery of the guns. The ship was mentioned in several histories of Sweden and the Swedish Navy, but the exact location of the ship and the details surrounding it varied. In 1844, the navy officer Anton Ludwig Fahnehjelm turned in a request for salvaging rights to the ship, claiming he had located it. Fahnehjelm was an inventor who designed an early form of light diving suit and had previously been involved in other salvage operations. No records exist of any major salvage attempts after Fahnehjelm filed his request, and it has been assumed that none was actually made. Recently, a map found in the Stockholm City Museum archives dated to the late 1830s marks the exact location of the ship with the word wrak ("wreck") and a dotted circle as well as detailed depth markings around the wreck site. In 1999, a witness also claimed that his father, a petty officer in the Swedish navy, had partaken in diving exercises down to Vasa in the 1920s.