The Quest to Find—and Save—the World’s Most Famous Shipwreck

Mental Floss ^ | 1/9/2019 | Lucas Reilly

[Fai Mao]

Anders Franzén lived for shipwrecks. An engineer and expert on the naval warfare of the 16th and 17th centuries, he was especially obsessed with the old Swedish men-of-war that had once menaced the Baltic Sea.

When he wasn’t busy at his day job with the Swedish Naval Administration, he’d spend hours combing through archives in search of maps and documents, hoping they might reveal the location of Sweden’s great sunken warships. And when he learned that one wreck might still be trapped, undiscovered, not far from his home in Stockholm, he was hungry to find it.

[Fai Mao]

You can visit this ship in Stockholm. It's impressive.

[Moonman62]

The boat’s exterior would be a palpable rainbow (gilded in gold leaf for extra measure). “The hundreds of sculptures clinging and clambering about the Vasa were an orgy of pink naked flesh, of steel-blue armor, of sanguine reds, poisonous greens, and marine blues,” writes Erling Matz in The Vasa Catalog. As Lars-Åke Kvarning writes in Scientific American, these ornaments had many purposes: “To encourage friends, intimidate enemies, assert claims, and impress the world with this picture of power and glory.”

...

Too bad they can’t or won’t restore the colors and gilding.

[grey_whiskers]

But we already KNOW where the Biden campaign is...

[ETCM]

The Quest to Find—and Save— the World’s Sweden's Most Famous Shipwreck

Globally, it might make the top 10, or not.

Pretty amazing effort to recover, save and restore the ship.

[Nateman]

I remember reading about this ship as a kid. At the time they were talking years before they could put it on open display. Even now they have discovered acids are forming inside the wood at a constant rate from all the minerals absorbed into the wood over the years. Somebody is bound to figure out a way to counter that.

[fieldmarshaldj]

*ping*

[SunkenCiv]

And if you immediately thought, "The Titanic", as I did, you'd be wrong..

[null and void]

And if you immediately thought, "The Titanic", as I did, you'd be wrong..

Hillary?

[SunkenCiv]

Heh, that's an easy association to make, Titanic, Iceberg, 6/7 below sealevel...

[mabarker1]

Petunia says "I KNOW ! I KNOW ! PICK ME ! PICK ME !!!"