Aztec Treasure House. Evan S. Connell
after the prize with a diving bell.
This recent invention, which resembled a church bell, was about four feet high and made of lead. The diver wore gloves, two pairs of leather boots, leather pants, a leather jacket lashed around his body to make it waterproof, and a wool cap. He stood on a platform slung beneath the bell and as he descended the water came up to his chest, leaving a pocket of compressed air at the top. He had a pair of pincers, a hooked pole, and some rope.
It seems impossible that a man with these elementary tools, inside a lead bell in frigid muddy water almost up to his neck, could accomplish much; yet the syndicate divers tore apart the Vasa’s superstructure and brought up about fifty cannons, most of which were sold abroad. Von Treileben then lost interest and began making plans for a voyage to the West Indies where he hoped to pick the bones of a Spanish galleon.
A man named Liverton, or Liberton, arrived in 1683 with a “special invention.” After being granted a license he recovered one cannon, which he tried unsuccessfully to sell to the Swedish government. That seems to have been the last salvage attempt.
It was now fifty-five years since Gustav’s monster went down. The tip of the mast had rotted away, or had been sawed off, so that nothing broke the surface. The Vasa was a hulk sinking imperceptibly deeper into the mud. And to the surprise of elderly citizens there were adults who never had heard of the famous ship.
How could it be forgotten? If you consider her size and prestige and splendor, as well as that spectacular maiden voyage—to say nothing of the evasive inconclusive court-martial which must have been talked about for many years—how could people forget the Vasa?
But of course it’s naïve to think like that. A nation is not anxious to remember its tragic miscalculations. Germany has been unable to forget Hitler, yet you can be sure that today’s German children do not think of him as their grandparents do, and by the long measuring rod of history the Nazi war has just ended. America cannot forget Vietnam, but be patient. Several centuries from now—unless our omniscient Pentagon does something cataclysmically stupid—you should be able to read American history without once encountering that painful word.
So, as debris stopped floating to the surface and mud built up against the hulk, and those who knew about the calamity died, the Vasa disappeared. Until at last there came a pleasant Sunday afternoon when the wharves were crowded with Stockholm citizens, none of whom could have told you anything at all about King Gustav’s benighted flagship.
In 1920 a Swedish historian was searching the archives for information about another seventeenth-century ship—the Riksnyckeln, which had sailed into a cliff one dark September night—when he came across the minutes of the Vasa court-martial and a reference to Treileben’s diving bell. Being an historian he naturally wrote a paper about it, and a boy named Anders Franzén heard about the Vasa because his father happened to read what the historian had written.
Now, the Franzéns usually vacationed on the island of Dalarö and there Anders saw a wooden gun carriage salvaged from the warship Riksäpplet which foundered in 1676. Although the gun carriage had been submerged more than two centuries the wood was still solid. This fact did not mean anything to him until 1939 when he took a boat trip with his father through the Göta Canal on Sweden’s west coast. There he saw the skeleton of another old ship, but its wood was spongy—eaten by the insatiable shipworm, Teredo navalis.
Given two long-submerged pieces of wood, one solid and one soft, most of us would say how curious and move on to something livelier. Young Franzén, however, did not let go. He thought there must be a reason for the discrepancy. The reason turned out to be Teredo navalis, which likes the taste of salt water. The Baltic around Stockholm has a salinity of 0.7 percent at most. Teredo navalis requires a minimum of 0.9 percent.
Again, after noting this tedious fact, most of us would move along. Not so young Franzén.
The Second World War interrupted his plans, but with that out of the way he began to get organized. He listed fifty ships known to have gone down in the vicinity of Stockholm. From this list he chose twelve: Sastervik, Resande Man, Vasa, Mars, Schwan of Lübeck, Riksäpplet, Kronan . . .
He started with the Riksäpplet because he knew approximately where to look, and because the ship had foundered in shallow water. He found it without much trouble, but he was too late. Very little remained. For 200 years the hulk had been crushed by drifting ice and waves. However, the few planks that he brought up were as solid as the gun carriage.
Franzén decided to hunt for the Vasa. Other ships might be easier to locate but this one sounded important.
He talked to Professor Nils Ahnlund, the historian, and after having learned to read seventeenth-century script he spent as much time as possible—by now he was a petroleum engineer—searching the naval archives. At last he knew the names of the men who had built the ship and those who had sailed it, and he knew quite a lot about the salvage attempts. But what he needed most, which he could not find, was a precise reference to the location of the ship. The Vasa, if it still existed, lay somewhere in Stockholm Ström “toward Lustholmen, Blochusudden, near Danuiken.”
By 1953, having read enough old documents to fill a closet, he was ready. This meant cruising back and forth across an expanse of Stockholm harbor in a motorboat, week after week, sweeping the bottom with wire drags and grapnels. In plain view of anybody who cared to watch he dredged up a great many lost, stolen, or undesirable artifacts: automobile tires, rusty bicycles, stoves, bedsteads, tangled fishing line, Christmas trees, goggles, boots, dead cats, chains, bottles—jetsam of the city.
This is not a job for a man sensitive to ridicule, especially when it becomes known that the man in the motorboat is hunting for a seventeenth-century battleship.
That winter he read another stack of musty documents, and he found an eighteenth-century map on which a cross had been drawn near Stadsgårdskajen. The cross allegedly marked the position of the Vasa, so Franzén spent the following summer cleaning that part of the harbor bottom.
Came winter, back to the library.
Summer, sweeping the harbor.
By this time Stockholm’s authentic fishermen must have stopped laughing and merely tapped their heads while Franzén reeled in his latest catch.
During the winter of 1956, once again in the archives sifting flaky old records, he came upon a letter from the Swedish parliament addressed to King Gustav, dated August 12, 1628. Gustav had been leading an army through Poland when the Vasa was launched. This letter was parliament’s report to the sovereign:
“And on that fateful Sunday, which was the tenth of this month, the Vasa set sail. But it happened that she got no further than Beckholmsudden, where she entirely fell on her side and sank to the bottom with cannon and all else, and lies in eighteen fathoms. . . .”
Beckholmsudden was doubly significant because while hauling up rubbish in that area Franzén had encountered a long muddy obstruction. Government engineers had told him it was rock blasted out of the island when a dry dock was built, so he had not investigated the strange hump. Now he went back to it, equipped with an instrument he had devised—a steel cylinder with a hollow punch in the front end. He threw this instrument overboard, waited until it struck bottom, and reeled it up. Inside the cylinder he found a plug of old black close-grained oak.
He dropped the cylinder at intervals along the length of the hump. Each time it brought back a plug of oak. So there could be no doubt that a wooden ship of Vasa’s dimensions lay on the bottom, very close to the navy diving school.
Franzén did not attempt to claim the ship for himself. He went to the navy, displayed his oak samples, told them what he suspected was there, and asked them to send a man down.
It is easy to guess what would have happened under these circumstances in the United States. After making an appointment and waiting in an air-conditioned lounge the applicant would have been ushered into the office of a lieutenant who would have listened with somnolent courtesy, looked at the plugs, and thanked the visitor for bringing this