Sunken Galleon
Vasa, the King's Ship. By Commander Bengt Ohrelius. Translated by Maurice Michael. (Cassell, 18s.) BETWEEN three and four in the afternoon of August 10, 1628, the man-o'-war Vasa, brilliantly painted, heavily ornamented, an important new addition to the Swedish fleet, left her berth in Stockholm Harbour. Two gusts of wind caused the great ship to heel, a third was too much for her. Water tore through the open gun-ports, the rail touched the sea, she capsized and went to the bottom, flags still flying.
At the board of inquiry which followed (the captain was arrested almost as soon as he struggled ashore) everyone from the builder to the bos'n passed the buck in classic style. When asked if he'd attended properly to the sails and ropes or whether he'd been drunk, the bos'n stoutly replied, 'That day I had been at the Lord's Table.' In its determination to find a scapegoat, the finger of the court pointed even at Gustavus II: the 'seri,' a table giving the, ship's most important dimensions, had been drawn up according to specific orders from him.
No record has ever been published of anyone' having been found guilty, let alone sentenced. A curious air of vagueness hung, and still hangs, over the affair, undispelled by, Commander Bengt Ohrelius's report (a valuable source-book for the full-length historical study as yet un- written) which extends to the final raising of the Vasa, after 331 years in her clay hole. Ohrelius is evidently much less fascinated by the original disaster than by the mechanical skills with which the Vasa was recovered: and it is a story of marvellous ingenuity and courage, particularly on the part of the divers, whose total descents numbered thousands.
Precisely why the Vasa capsized is a mystery still under investigation. No one seems yet cer- tain whether she was clumsily designed, over- gunned, badly ballasted, poorly handled. Speak- ing of the pleasures of marine archwology in general, Commander Ohrethis writes, with a cheery kind of insensitivity to the human tragedies involved, 'We Swedes are lucky in living beside a sea that is singularly rich in this respect.' I wonder, to take the instance closest at hand, what the fifty seamen believed lost in the Vasa would have to say to that one?
The illustrations, maps, sketches and general presentation of the book are exciting and imaginative, and tend to sink Commander Ohrethis's disappointingly pedestrian narrative almost without trace.
CHARLES CAUSLEY
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