While in Stockholm we visited the museum containing the 17th century ship Vasa. The Vasa was a ship built in 1626-1628 in Stockholm and on it’s maiden voyage sank in Stockholm Harbor, and after the valuable cannons were recovered in the 1700’s, was forgotten until it was raised in 1961. After years of restoration and repair it ended up in the museum in 1988. This is the top tourist attraction in Sweden the ship is the source of Swedish ship recovery mania.
The Wikipedia page here has the full interesting story but for those of you that don’t care the short story is as follows.
The King of Sweden had Sweden at war with Poland and some other guys. Sweden was the big kahuna in the early 1600’s around northern Europe. This was some secular conflict between Catholics and Protestants (similar to the Sunni Shia thing in the mid east). The King guy wanted a big boat with 2 gun decks and big guns since most the battles were on the Baltic Sea. So he got his Dutch shipbuilder to agree to his dimensions (which apparently was the way things were done, no science or data) and the shipbuilder started building a big ol’ boat. He got sick and turned it over to his #2 guy before going on and being ill and eventually dying sometime before the ship launched. The new guy kind of felt there might be something wrong with the design but couldn’t do anything about it so they completed the boat. Some quality control type guy came along and had 30 guys run from one side of the ship to the other to show the head navy guy that it was unstable but the head navy guy said “ship it” because the King had been sending letters saying “get me the damn boat” . So it set sail and a strong breeze hit it (not a light wind) and it rolled over and water entered through it’s gun openings and it sank about 1400 yards from dock. As someone that has worked in quality quite a few years I have seen many ship sinkings caused by the same issues. Poor design, unbending time scales, and know it all management types that think their position and ego over rule the law of physics. They had a big investigation and found no one at fault (probably because the King was at fault as much as anyone with his demands and top down management system) and the dead shipbuilding guy went down in history as being not so good.
The museum itself was quite dark and made picture taking quite difficult (unlike the wiki guys that obviously had a closed museum and lights). This is a 1/10 scale model that has been painted as they think the Vasa was painted (if you are a King you have to show off)
This picture from the back is about the only picture that is any good (for those that are wondering this was shot with ISO 6400, it was really dark there and space too big for flash.)
So anyway it was a good museum, a lot of explanation and things to see. Just wish they had more light.
On our way back from the museum we passed this gate to part of the huge city park.
This was just before the bridge on this street leading back to the city.
Stockholm is on about the same latitude as Anchorage Alaska so for about half the year it is grey and dark. Sunset was between 3 and 4 in the afternoon while we were there. We walked along the water to the far distance of the picture to our hotel which was right next to this poorly named clothing store.
We went in; should have been called Crap Studios.