Aztec Treasure House. Evan S. Connell
to Washington where it would have dried and curled until it resembled the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The Swedes, after listening to Franzén’s story, dispatched their most experienced diver.
Chief Diver Per Edvin Fälting went down and reported that he had landed in mud up to his chest. He could not see anything.
Franzén suggested trying another area.
Just then Fälting said that he had felt what might be a wooden wall. It was a big wall, he said, possibly the side of a ship. Fälting then climbed partway up and discovered a square hole—almost certainly a gunport. Higher on the wall he felt another square hole, which meant that he was clinging to the Vasa because no other ship with a double row of gunports had been lost in Stockholm harbor.
Everybody got excited. Here was a relic of the days when Sweden had been a formidable power, when every nation in Europe listened apprehensively to King Gustavus Adolphus.
A television camera dipped into the water to prove to the Swedes that what they had been told was there actually was there. And indeed it was. The camera relayed a blurred, sinister image of the giant warship: upright, sealed to the waterline in hard clay. The stubs of her masts thrust violently toward the surface. In the muck that covered her decks lay the tangled chains and irons of seventeenth-century scavengers.
Millions of kronor later the Vasa had been pried from the mud, lifted a few feet by two gigantic pontoons, and very cautiously towed like an implausible submarine to nearby Castle Island where, in shallow water, the deposit of centuries was scraped off.
And what came to the surface, dragged from the grasp of The Old One—Den Gamle—was at times unexpected and beautiful and wondrous: gilded carvings of cherubs, musicians, caryatids, mermaids, tritons, knights, dragons, heraldic devices, a bird with an eel in its beak, a man in a rippling cloak, Hercules with the hellhound Cerberus chained at his feet, the god Nereus, King David playing a lyre.
But more often what came up was useful and ordinary and pathetic: mugs, clay pipes, a pocket sundial, a cockaded felt hat, ramrods, axes, smashed beer kegs, tankards, leather boots, pottery, wood bowls, casks of butter, carpenters’ tools, muskets, ladles, a slipper, a bronze candlestick, one blue Dutch picture plate showing a bird on a rock, an apothecary’s kit, a gold signet ring from which the seal was missing, a seaman’s ditty box, another little box holding a lock of hair. Many such personal items Den Gamle released, after being urged by the suction hose.
On the deck beside Captain Hansson’s dining table, among shards of crockery that must have fallen when the Vasa heeled, lay a tightly stoppered flask containing some dense, dark liquid. When Eisenhower visited Sweden in 1962 he was offered a taste. Ike, not a reckless man, observed and sniffed Captain Hansson’s schnapps but declined a drink.
And the great lion figurehead—carved from limewood, weighing two tons, springing toward the enemy—this mighty sculpture was raised from the bottom.
Den Gamle also permitted a number of skeletons to be taken from his ship, most of them still attached to their clothing, and scientists learned that there had been at least two ethnic types aboard. The skulls of one man and one woman were short, with conspicuous cheekbones, suggesting that they were Finnish. The other skulls were typically Nordic. One skull held the residue of a brain.
Among the crew members there had been a man in his late twenties or perhaps thirty, judging by the bones. A scientist who worked on the project had this to say about him: “He was dressed in a knit vest of thick wool and knit wool trousers which showed folds above the hips and were apparently fastened below the knees. Over the vest he wore a long-sleeved jacket with pleated coattails. Under the vest he wore a linen shirt. A pair of sandals and sewn linen stockings completed his dress. A sheath and a knife with a bone handle, as well as a leather money bag, were fastened to his belt. A few coins were in his trousers pockets. Altogether he had about twenty öre in copper money.”
In 1628 you could buy a chicken for twenty öre. One chicken and maybe a drink of rum. That was what the sailor had in his pocket when the Vasa capsized—enough to buy a chicken. A swallow of rum, perhaps, with a chicken for lunch, or a moment in the arms of a pretty girl.
What else is there to say? Given a description of his clothes, given those coppers in his pocket, we could just about summarize a sailor’s life to the hour of his death. And we know when that occurred: August 10, 1628, not long after three in the afternoon, while King Gustavus Adolphus marched fearlessly through Poland.
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