The Vasa

The account

The pride of the Swedish navy sailed thirteen hundred metres into her maiden voyage, caught a gust, heeled, and sank in the harbour with the city watching, too tall, too narrow, too proud. The cold brackish Baltic kept the shipworm out, and in 1961 she came up almost whole after 333 years. No other ship of her age survives like this; she is a Tudor-era warship you can stand beneath.

Leads, where the trail points now

• The Swedish warship capsized on her 1628 maiden voyage minutes from the dock, too tall and over-gunned; she was raised nearly intact in 1961 and is the heart of the Vasa Museum in Stockholm.
• This is a conservation story, not a hunt; the open problem is preserving the waterlogged oak and managing the acids attacking it.
• The 1961 salvage recovered thousands of objects, and the site is fully documented and protected.