Swedish King's 'forgotten' 17th-century warship found in central Stockholm | Hacker News Reader

Swedish King's 'forgotten' 17th-century warship found in central Stockholm

thelocal.se

136 pointspepys43 comments

Relevant random factoid: the Baltic Sea is almost completely enclosed by land and consequently unusually brackish (low in salt), which means a number of sea creatures common in saltier seas, most notably the shipworm, can't live there. Add in the fact that the water is really cold most of the year, and you get a large number of unusually well-preserved wooden wrecks, most famously the Vasa, that would have long go have been eaten away in any other ocean.

https://www.vasamuseet.se/en

Speaking of eating, access to the salty Atlantic means that the Norwegians eat lots of shrimp, crab, mussels and even whale, none of which were historically available on the Baltic shores of Sweden or Finland.

The interesting explanation for why it's the least saline sea in the world, is that there is a narrow outlet channel via Kattegat, and the volume of water from rivers with outlets in the Baltic far exceeds the amount of water that evaporates, so there is a constant outflow of water through Kattegat. So there's not much salty water backdraft. We have perch and ordinary grass growing in the Baltic - weird!

Sweden has a western side too, which is where we get all the delicious https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandalus_borealis from.

Hey, you misspelled https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surstromming

:) On a serious note, every other kind of shrimp I have tasted besides "northern prawn" (Pandalus Borealis) is just meh in comparison. To clarify: the rest of the culinary world use non-tasteful shrimp as taste carriers. Meanwhile, north sea shrimp are.. the primary source of taste, here.

I think you will be surprised when you eventually taste it!

That surströmming thing is mainly a bravado thing our northern people do. It's good for headlines and machoism both, which is why it has survived, I guess.

I was going to say - bah, in Canada we have exceptionally tasty shrimp on the west coast, sold directly from the boats and it will beat your borealis to a pulp. But then, just in case, I checked what your shrimp looks like and guess what - it's the same one! :)

:) Do you know if there is a scientific name for the shrimp?

I'm thinking the cold water is the primary ingredient in having yummy shrimp.

Canada produces a lot of Pandalus Borealis too, which is fairly common in Canadian supermarkets.

I'll second this. I recently spent some time in Sweden and, on the whole, really enjoyed the shrimp. In particular, the shrimp salad sandwiches. There were bad ones, of course. Bröd & Salt was a fast-food/bakery chain whose shrimp salad wraps weren't very good at all. However, I had some at other places that were good enough to inspire me to try my hand at them once back in Canada.

The results with Canadian shrimp? Superior to anything in Sweden, but probably because the shrimp went from frozen to cooked and on the plate in under an hour, while the sandwiches I had in Sweden probably had shrimp that had been sitting in the fridge for a while. The taste of the shrimp was very similar. In any case, I strongly recommend trying your hand at making Swedish shrimp salad sandwiches. They're easy to make and delicious!

Edit: It would appear I used "Wild Atlantic Prawns", which were likely Pandalus borealis. So, probably the same species. They're very common in Canadian supermarkets. I didn't realize how lucky we are!

Frozen shrimp? It has to be boiled in sea water on the boat it was caught and eaten the same day. I refuse to eat frozen shrimp.

It's only called strömming on the east coast. The same fish is called sill on the west and south coast.

> would have long go have been eaten away in any other ocean

Ahem!

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/10/black-sea-shipwre...

I briefly worked for a company at this little island, Skeppsholmen [1], a while back. It's beautiful and fairly hidden/quiet, despite being in central Stockholm. There's a hostel ship you can stay at too [2], which I highly recommend if you are in Stockholm on a budget. The Museum of Modern Arts [3] is quite good too, as far as museums in Stockholm go. As well as the Vasa Museum, which people have already mention.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeppsholmen

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Af_Chapman_(ship)

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moderna_museet

There's a couple museums around the Chapman, but other than those it's inconveniently located. The other hostels in old town and sodermalm are better (and less bare-bones/no-frills). It is beautiful to look at in the moonlight, though.

Anyone else get a spam virus warning pop up on this site? I got one on my iPhone.

Yup be careful on this site!

Reminds me of the buried ships under San Francisco. There sure is a lot of history underground.

http://www.sfgenealogy.com/sf/history/hgshp1.htm

The article mentions that the ship may have participated in the Battle of Oliwa, though there is no mention of it in the manifest on Wikipedia[0]. Regardless, the battle (and the Polish-Swedish Wars in general) are historically very interesting in themselves, esp. given that they -- the Deluge in particular -- were a contributing factor in the fall of Poland.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Oliwa

Right next to museums. A very convenient find! :)

A similarly convenient find in London was that the Roman amphitheatre was right underneath the City of London's main museum [1], the Guildhall gallery. Because the museum is on one side of Guildhall Yard, the historic seat of the City's government. Which is located where it is because that is where the Saxon guildhall was. Which was there because it was a nice open space amongst the rubble of the old citadel when the Saxons recolonised London. Which it was because it was the old Roman amphitheatre.

[1] In a sense.

I was amazed to read that they didn't even intend to remove it and place it in a museum. They just buried it again. Apparently, an early 17th century ship wasn't a significant enough find to justify the costs of preserving it!

They must have a lot of old ships around there to not want to bother. Anything like that found in the United States would end up as the star attraction in a museum for sure.

"We took some chronological samples in the summer and we received the results which showed that wood is oak from Sweden, and it was cut in the winter between 1612 and 1613, which is a really good, precise measure."

I'm really curious about the analysis process involved here. Is C-14 dating that precise? How do they know it was oak from Sweden?

Just as likely they analyzed the width of the growth rings. Trees in a given area will have similar high growth and low growth years.

And then there are big events where growth will correspond across wider regions.

So you mean for a plank of wood, you would do some statistical analysis based on the series of the widths of the growth things and then match them with other recorded widths/deltas to try to find a match?

(Yeah, it seems plausible that it would work.)

Yep. The field is called dendrochronology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrochronology

We can rule out carbon dating because oak grows for hundreds approaching thousands of years and so the carbon dates wouldn't narrow things down. When archeologists send things to be carbon dated they try to find very short-lived woods or seeds.

The way you can date oak so precisely is by the comparative widths of the tree-rings. This is called dendrochronology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrochronology

Carbon dating measures the ratio of C14 to C12. This ratio doesn't start to change until they die, and are no longer renewing their carbon from the environment. Radiocarbon dating does provide an accurate date (although less accurate than dendro) for wooden items, and works with a wider range of samples.

That's for short lived organisms. Trees do not renew most of their carbon during their lifetime, cellular walls are created and very rarely destroyed.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrochronology

Apperently there are enough core sample data to determine when a tree was cut down anytime the last few thousand years!

(Thanks to everyone who pointed this out.)

Wow. This is fascinating stuff. (I didn't think this field could be so interesting.)

>How do they know it was oak from Sweden?

Maybe it has something to do with good records-keeping back then- these ship-worthy oak trees were treasured and protected:

"Oaks and cultural history Over the centuries, the oak has been a significant tree in Swedish life and in many ways Johan’s book is also a cultural history of the tree. Oaks were central, for example, to the shipbuilding industry during the reign of King Gustav Vasa. A large ship required approximately 2,000 oaks so laws were introduced to protect them; anyone caught cutting down or damaging oaks or seedlings found themselves subject to severe penalties."

http://www.su.se/english/about/news-and-events/a-pictorial-a...

Funny anecdote time! The oaks mentioned in the article, on Visingsö, were planted in the early 19th century for future war ships. In 1975 the chief of the forest service called the chief of navy telling him the oaks were ready for harvest. For some reason he declined the offer, but thought it would be nice if the forest could be preserved, which it were.

A clear case of premature optimization.

So, sometimes, in a century or two we figure out we were worrying about (and investing on) the wrong thing.

Well, there's always the recreational value of worrying.

There are measured ring-width chronologies from all over Europe. Years which are hot and dry give small amounts of tree growth; wetter years give more growth. The sequence of thick and thin rings correlates across large regions, allowing the dating of oak wood with a sufficient number of rings -- about 100 for good certainty. In many cases it is possible to identify a much finer location where trees were grown. While there is some correlation between (say) weather in Sweden and Germany, the correlation is much higher in nearby locations. It is often possible to locate wood to a specific forest just based on the ring widths.

the Swedish kingdom power peak of 17th century when it conquered almost all of the land around Baltic and deep into Poland and modern Ukraine correlates nicely with the Little Ice Age. To the south, south/east of Baltic that was the time of "Deluge" when among other things rows of bad harvest years weakened the economy/society/state. Effects of climate changes :)

I warmly recommend everyone visit the Vasa museum in Stockholm https://www.vasamuseet.se/en

Its a massive warship that capsized on her maiden voyage, and was raised in 1960s and is preserved in staggeringly amazing detail and completeness. Its absolutely gobsmackingly breathtaking :)

And once you leave wander over to Båthall 2 Sjöhistoriska a few minutes away for a small free museum full of beautiful old wooden boats.

Very warmly recommended, an awesome museum.

I especially liked the story about the Vasa construction being an example of bad project management: If there's too much of a power difference between different actors, people might drown.

Speaking of warmly: if you happen to visit in summer, dress more warmly than you normally would because the museum is fairly cold to better preserve the ship.

Visited this in 2008, on my backpacking adventures through Europe. Awesome place! We went in the Fall, Stockholm was beautiful, and great weather. Nice and cool for walking.

Amazing too, that the map in this article shows the ship was found directly across the water from the Vasa museum!

I second the Vasa recommendation. Absolutely fantastic.

On the heels of the release of "It" in theaters tomorrow, and "The Dark Tower" last month, this has been a great year for Stephen King!

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