An Extraordinary 500-Year-Old Shipwreck Is Rewriting the History of the Age of Discovery | History | Smithsonian Magazine
HISTORY | NOVEMBER 2021
An Extraordinary 500-Year-Old Shipwreck Is Rewriting the History of the Age of Discovery
In the frigid Baltic Sea, archaeologists probing the surprisingly well-preserved remains of a revolutionary warship are seeing the era in a new way
The timbers of a 500-year-old ship rest on the floor of the Baltic Sea. Scholars and divers are studying the legendary wreck.
Brett Seymour
By Jo Marchant
At the southern edge of Sweden, not far from the picturesque town of Ronneby, lies a tiny island called Stora Ekon. Sprinkled with pine trees, sheep and a few deserted holiday cottages, the low-lying island is one of hundreds that shelter the coast from the storms of the Baltic Sea. For centuries, the spot was a popular anchorage point, but the waters are now mostly quiet; the most prominent visitors, apart from the occasional pleasure boat, are migrating swans.
Guibert Gates
For a few weeks in May, however, a new island intruded on this peaceful scene: A square wood raft topped with two converted shipping containers just a few hundred feet from Stora Ekon’s shoreward coast. The floating platform was busy with divers and archaeologists, here to explore what lies beneath the waves: the wreck of a ship called Gribshunden, a spectacular “floating castle” that served as the royal flagship of King Hans of Denmark more than 500 years ago. Historical sources record how the ship sank in the summer of 1495, along with a large contingent of soldiers and Danish noblemen, although not the king himself, who was ashore at the time.
Shipwrecks from this period are exceedingly rare. Unless a ship is buried quickly by sediment, the wood is eaten away over the centuries by shipworm, actually a type of saltwater clam. But these organisms don’t survive in the fresher waters of the Baltic, and archaeologists believe that much of Hans’ vessel and its contents are preserved. That promises them an unprecedented look at the life of a medieval king who was said to travel with an abundance of royal possessions, not only food and clothing but weapons, tools, textiles, documents and precious treasures. More than that, the relic provides a unique opportunity to examine a state-of-the-art warship from a little-understood period, when a revolution in shipbuilding and naval warfare was reshaping geopolitics and transforming civilization. What Gribshunden represents, researchers think, is nothing less than the end of the Middle Ages and the birth of the modern world.
At the edge of the raft, Brendan Foley, an archaeologist from Lund University in Sweden, and his chief safety officer, Phil Short, are getting ready to dive. Despite the springtime sun, a cold wind blows. Because the water temperature is below 50 degrees, the divers are wearing drysuits and heated underwear that will allow them to work for two hours or more. After extensive planning and a long pandemic delay, Foley is visibly eager to enter the water. “I’ve been waiting for this moment for two years,” he says. He steps off the deck with a splash and makes an OK sign before disappearing from view.
King Hans of Denmark Tarker / Bridgeman Images
The story of Gribshunden is preserved in several “Chronicles,” narrative histories written in northern Europe in the 16th century, and in an eyewitness account by a young nobleman who survived the disaster. The accounts describe how King Hans, who reigned over Denmark and Norway from 1481 to 1513, sailed east from Copenhagen in the summer of 1495 toward Kalmar, Sweden, to attend a political summit. Europe was then emerging from the Middle Ages into the Renaissance. Dukes and kings ruled from giant castles, and every nobleman’s wardrobe included a suit of armor. In Italy, Leonardo da Vinci was starting work on The Last Supper. In Poland, Nicolaus Copernicus was beginning his studies in astronomy.
Across the Baltic Sea, Denmark, Norway and Sweden had been ruled together under an agreement called the Kalmar Union for close to 100 years, but Sweden had broken away, and rebels there, led by a nobleman named Sten Sture, sought independence. Hans was on a mission to quell the dissent and revive the union by becoming king of Sweden, too. According to the accounts, Hans took a suitably regal fleet of 18 ships, led by Gribshunden, which carried his courtiers, noblemen, soldiers, even a royal astronomer.
But many of them never arrived: Hans’ flagship sank while anchored just north of Stora Ekon. A 16th-century account of Hans’ life, only recently translated from Latin, suggests the ship’s store of gunpowder accidentally ignited, causing a fire that consumed the ship so quickly that many on board perished in the smoke and flames. Others threw themselves into the water and drowned. The source adds that the fire occurred while the king was attending a meeting of supporters, probably on Stora Ekon. Other sources record the treasures that sank with the ship: “clothes, precious things, seals and letters,” and “silver, gold, charters and the king’s best stores.”
Local divers came across the wreck’s protruding timbers in the summer of 1971, unaware of its historical significance, and they collected the curious lead balls they found nearby as souvenirs. One of the divers finally alerted local archaeologists to the wreck in 2001, after he found strange, hollowed-out logs resting on the seafloor: carriages, researchers realized, that once held cannons. This was no fishing boat or trading vessel, it turned out. It was a centuries-old warship of a type never before seen.
In northern Europe, boats were long built by riveting together overlapping planks to make a waterproof shell. Viking longships, with their rounded hulls and single, square sails, used this “clinker” construction method. In southern Europe, by contrast, there was a tradition of “carvel” construction, in which hull planks were placed edge to edge. In the 15th century, carvel planking spread north, becoming the design of choice for kings and noblemen throughout Europe. Carvel-built hulls gained their strength from the internal ribs, or skeleton, which also made it easier to build larger ships that could carry extensive cargo, crew and stores. And crucially, in contrast to clinker vessels, they could accommodate gun ports, which meant that heavy guns could be carried deep inside the hull without toppling a ship.
“Scandinavian ships were beautiful and elegant and sailed to Iceland and Greenland,” says Filipe Castro, a nautical archaeologist previously based at Texas A&M University. “But when the opportunity to put guns on them came along,” he continued, they proved inadequate.
By the end of the 15th century, shipwrights in Portugal and Spain were combining northern and southern features to build heavily armed, uniquely large vessels that could cross oceans, spend months or even years at sea, and extend awesome military force. These were the “space shuttles,” as Castro calls them, that carried the explorers of the Age of Discovery: Christopher Columbus on his Spanish-sponsored voyage across the Atlantic in 1492; the Portuguese admiral Vasco da Gama, who sailed 12,000 miles around Africa, arriving in India in May 1498; and Ferdinand Magellan, who embarked on the first circumnavigation of the Earth (completed after his death in 1522). They allowed for “a new globalization through colonization and exploitation,” writes Johan Rönnby, a maritime archaeologist at Sweden’s Sodertorn University. “The looting and transportation of gold, spices, sugar and many other goods across the oceans changed the world forever.” Or, as Foley, puts it: “This was the enabling technology for European domination of the planet.”
Gribshunden belonged to the first generation of ships to cross oceans and reach distant lands. The large vessels combined rounded, Nordic-style hulls constructed from ribs and planks in ways pioneered by shipwrights in Spain and Portugal. Above, a page from an illuminated copy of a medieval narrative known as Froissart’s Chronicles, illustrated in the 1470s, shows the French Navy at sea. Scholars believe that the warship at center closely resembles Gribshunden. They make particular note of the gun ports, heraldic banners and shields, and the sculpted figurehead. Left, King Hans of Denmark. British Library / Granger, NYC
But no example of these carvel-built “ships of discovery,” Iberian or otherwise, had ever been found intact, a deficit Castro describes as “one of the big holes in our puzzle.” Specialists have had to infer their design from artist interpretations and a few surviving miniature models, and had only the murkiest understanding of how this revolutionary technology spread through Europe.
That was about to change. In 2013, Niklas Eriksson, an archaeologist and expert in medieval ships at Stockholm University, inspected the wreck off Stora Ekon. The Swedish historian Ingvar Sjöblom had speculated that the wreck was Gribshunden, based on its age and location, but others, including Eriksson, were skeptical. “I thought it can’t be,” he told me.
But when he saw the wreck himself he was amazed. The hull was larger than reported—nearly 100 feet long—and there were remains of elevated, built-up areas, known as castles, that protruded out at the bow and stern. Moreover, the construction of the hull suggested the ship could only have belonged to the king. A chronicle of the life of Sten Sture, the Swedish rebel, described the long-lost Gribshunden as a rare “kraffweel,” or carvel, and what Eriksson realized during his dive was that the wreck’s hull planks were laid edge to edge. It really was Hans’ royal ship: one of these pioneering vessels had been hiding in the shallow green waters of Sweden all along.
When Foley first learned about the wreck, he didn’t believe it either. “I thought if it was important, I’d have heard of it already,” he says, sitting in a makeshift office on the dive platform. On the table is an espresso machine he proudly tells me is the same model featured in The Life Aquatic, Wes Anderson’s irreverent homage to the marine explorer Jacques Cousteau.
Foley is a 52-year-old American with a genial manner and a sense for the dramatic. He trained with the oceanographer Bob Ballard, who discovered the Titanic, and he now specializes in exploring underwater vessels of all types, from planes to submarines. He spent several years excavating a first-century B.C. cargo ship near the Greek island of Antikythera that sank with clay vessels, coins, bronze and marble artworks, and, most famously, a sophisticated mechanical device described as the world’s oldest “computer.” Before he came to Stora Ekon, he had been working for the U.S. military, recovering the remains of servicemen from crashed World War II bombers, one off Croatia and another off Sweden.
His journey to Stora Ekon began in 2017, after he joined his wife, Maria Hansson, a Swedish geneticist based in Lund, from Massachusetts, where Foley had worked at MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. When his new colleagues told him about Gribshunden, he assumed they were hyping a local attraction. Then he attended a meeting with Rönnby, Eriksson and colleagues from the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen. “They were telling me about the wreck, and I said, Are you kidding me? The only known example of a ship of discovery, the first example of a purpose-built warship—and it’s sitting in just nine meters of water?!”
One facet of the Gribshundenproject is a comprehensive study of the wooden barrels in the ship's hold. Dendrochronology reveals not only when the trees were cut, but where they grew. Chemical and biological analysis may determine the contents of the barrels. Here, Brendan Foley lifts a box containing wooden barrel components from the water, while archaeologists Paola Derudas and Marie Jonsson stand by. Klas Malmberg
The site had already been mapped, and a few artifacts salvaged, including a giant, fearsome figurehead, carved to resemble a monster swallowing a screaming man. But, partly because of the cost, only limited excavations had been carried out. Foley formed a consortium of Swedish and Danish institutions and secured funding from the Crafoord Foundation, founded by the entrepreneur behind Tetra Pak, a multinational food packaging conglomerate, to explore further. In 2019, Foley conducted an initial excavation with Rönnby, who had led several previous studies of the wreck. Foley has been trying to return ever since. Days before work was set to begin this spring, two members of the research team informed Foley they couldn’t join (one was recovering from Covid, another had his visa rejected). Then Foley found himself in the hospital facing emergency surgery for gallstones. “I almost called it off,” he says.
Instead, with his doctors’ approval and orders to follow a strict diet, he went ahead. The international group of experts he’s assembled has set up a white scaffold on the seabed to define their excavation trench, choosing a site near the stern—an educated guess about where the royal quarters were located.
Down on the seabed, Foley and the other divers work in pairs—an archaeologist with a dive specialist. They sift through layers of debris, including firewood and smashed barrels. Farther down, everything is encased in a fine black sediment that “jiggles like jello,” Foley says. To remove it, the archaeologists use trowels or paintbrushes and suck up the resulting debris clouds into the hose of a dredge pump—like a giant vacuum cleaner—to keep the water clear. (Later, they sift through the “dredge pile” to make sure they don’t overlook any items of interest.) They also record every stage of the excavations by taking hundreds of photographs and videos that Paola Derudas, a data specialist from Lund University, builds into 3-D virtual maps of the site. At the ship’s stern, ghostly timbers, covered in marine growth, jut upward out of the silt. Elsewhere, the hull has split open and fallen outward, resulting in a jumble of planks that lie scattered in the green light. “It’s a beautiful mess!” says Mikael Björk, an archaeologist from Sweden’s Blekinge Museum. But once you get to know it, “you get a sense of the ship,” he says. “You can feel the story.”
HISTORY | NOVEMBER 2021
An Extraordinary 500-Year-Old Shipwreck Is Rewriting the History of the Age of Discovery
In the frigid Baltic Sea, archaeologists probing the surprisingly well-preserved remains of a revolutionary warship are seeing the era in a new way
The timbers of a 500-year-old ship rest on the floor of the Baltic Sea. Scholars and divers are studying the legendary wreck.
Brett Seymour
By Jo Marchant
At the southern edge of Sweden, not far from the picturesque town of Ronneby, lies a tiny island called Stora Ekon. Sprinkled with pine trees, sheep and a few deserted holiday cottages, the low-lying island is one of hundreds that shelter the coast from the storms of the Baltic Sea. For centuries, the spot was a popular anchorage point, but the waters are now mostly quiet; the most prominent visitors, apart from the occasional pleasure boat, are migrating swans.
For a few weeks in May, however, a new island intruded on this peaceful scene: A square wood raft topped with two converted shipping containers just a few hundred feet from Stora Ekon’s shoreward coast. The floating platform was busy with divers and archaeologists, here to explore what lies beneath the waves: the wreck of a ship called Gribshunden, a spectacular “floating castle” that served as the royal flagship of King Hans of Denmark more than 500 years ago. Historical sources record how the ship sank in the summer of 1495, along with a large contingent of soldiers and Danish noblemen, although not the king himself, who was ashore at the time.
Shipwrecks from this period are exceedingly rare. Unless a ship is buried quickly by sediment, the wood is eaten away over the centuries by shipworm, actually a type of saltwater clam. But these organisms don’t survive in the fresher waters of the Baltic, and archaeologists believe that much of Hans’ vessel and its contents are preserved. That promises them an unprecedented look at the life of a medieval king who was said to travel with an abundance of royal possessions, not only food and clothing but weapons, tools, textiles, documents and precious treasures. More than that, the relic provides a unique opportunity to examine a state-of-the-art warship from a little-understood period, when a revolution in shipbuilding and naval warfare was reshaping geopolitics and transforming civilization. What Gribshunden represents, researchers think, is nothing less than the end of the Middle Ages and the birth of the modern world.
At the edge of the raft, Brendan Foley, an archaeologist from Lund University in Sweden, and his chief safety officer, Phil Short, are getting ready to dive. Despite the springtime sun, a cold wind blows. Because the water temperature is below 50 degrees, the divers are wearing drysuits and heated underwear that will allow them to work for two hours or more. After extensive planning and a long pandemic delay, Foley is visibly eager to enter the water. “I’ve been waiting for this moment for two years,” he says. He steps off the deck with a splash and makes an OK sign before disappearing from view.
The story of Gribshunden is preserved in several “Chronicles,” narrative histories written in northern Europe in the 16th century, and in an eyewitness account by a young nobleman who survived the disaster. The accounts describe how King Hans, who reigned over Denmark and Norway from 1481 to 1513, sailed east from Copenhagen in the summer of 1495 toward Kalmar, Sweden, to attend a political summit. Europe was then emerging from the Middle Ages into the Renaissance. Dukes and kings ruled from giant castles, and every nobleman’s wardrobe included a suit of armor. In Italy, Leonardo da Vinci was starting work on The Last Supper. In Poland, Nicolaus Copernicus was beginning his studies in astronomy.
Across the Baltic Sea, Denmark, Norway and Sweden had been ruled together under an agreement called the Kalmar Union for close to 100 years, but Sweden had broken away, and rebels there, led by a nobleman named Sten Sture, sought independence. Hans was on a mission to quell the dissent and revive the union by becoming king of Sweden, too. According to the accounts, Hans took a suitably regal fleet of 18 ships, led by Gribshunden, which carried his courtiers, noblemen, soldiers, even a royal astronomer.
But many of them never arrived: Hans’ flagship sank while anchored just north of Stora Ekon. A 16th-century account of Hans’ life, only recently translated from Latin, suggests the ship’s store of gunpowder accidentally ignited, causing a fire that consumed the ship so quickly that many on board perished in the smoke and flames. Others threw themselves into the water and drowned. The source adds that the fire occurred while the king was attending a meeting of supporters, probably on Stora Ekon. Other sources record the treasures that sank with the ship: “clothes, precious things, seals and letters,” and “silver, gold, charters and the king’s best stores.”
Local divers came across the wreck’s protruding timbers in the summer of 1971, unaware of its historical significance, and they collected the curious lead balls they found nearby as souvenirs. One of the divers finally alerted local archaeologists to the wreck in 2001, after he found strange, hollowed-out logs resting on the seafloor: carriages, researchers realized, that once held cannons. This was no fishing boat or trading vessel, it turned out. It was a centuries-old warship of a type never before seen.
In northern Europe, boats were long built by riveting together overlapping planks to make a waterproof shell. Viking longships, with their rounded hulls and single, square sails, used this “clinker” construction method. In southern Europe, by contrast, there was a tradition of “carvel” construction, in which hull planks were placed edge to edge. In the 15th century, carvel planking spread north, becoming the design of choice for kings and noblemen throughout Europe. Carvel-built hulls gained their strength from the internal ribs, or skeleton, which also made it easier to build larger ships that could carry extensive cargo, crew and stores. And crucially, in contrast to clinker vessels, they could accommodate gun ports, which meant that heavy guns could be carried deep inside the hull without toppling a ship.
“Scandinavian ships were beautiful and elegant and sailed to Iceland and Greenland,” says Filipe Castro, a nautical archaeologist previously based at Texas A&M University. “But when the opportunity to put guns on them came along,” he continued, they proved inadequate.
By the end of the 15th century, shipwrights in Portugal and Spain were combining northern and southern features to build heavily armed, uniquely large vessels that could cross oceans, spend months or even years at sea, and extend awesome military force. These were the “space shuttles,” as Castro calls them, that carried the explorers of the Age of Discovery: Christopher Columbus on his Spanish-sponsored voyage across the Atlantic in 1492; the Portuguese admiral Vasco da Gama, who sailed 12,000 miles around Africa, arriving in India in May 1498; and Ferdinand Magellan, who embarked on the first circumnavigation of the Earth (completed after his death in 1522). They allowed for “a new globalization through colonization and exploitation,” writes Johan Rönnby, a maritime archaeologist at Sweden’s Sodertorn University. “The looting and transportation of gold, spices, sugar and many other goods across the oceans changed the world forever.” Or, as Foley, puts it: “This was the enabling technology for European domination of the planet.”
But no example of these carvel-built “ships of discovery,” Iberian or otherwise, had ever been found intact, a deficit Castro describes as “one of the big holes in our puzzle.” Specialists have had to infer their design from artist interpretations and a few surviving miniature models, and had only the murkiest understanding of how this revolutionary technology spread through Europe.
That was about to change. In 2013, Niklas Eriksson, an archaeologist and expert in medieval ships at Stockholm University, inspected the wreck off Stora Ekon. The Swedish historian Ingvar Sjöblom had speculated that the wreck was Gribshunden, based on its age and location, but others, including Eriksson, were skeptical. “I thought it can’t be,” he told me.
But when he saw the wreck himself he was amazed. The hull was larger than reported—nearly 100 feet long—and there were remains of elevated, built-up areas, known as castles, that protruded out at the bow and stern. Moreover, the construction of the hull suggested the ship could only have belonged to the king. A chronicle of the life of Sten Sture, the Swedish rebel, described the long-lost Gribshunden as a rare “kraffweel,” or carvel, and what Eriksson realized during his dive was that the wreck’s hull planks were laid edge to edge. It really was Hans’ royal ship: one of these pioneering vessels had been hiding in the shallow green waters of Sweden all along.
When Foley first learned about the wreck, he didn’t believe it either. “I thought if it was important, I’d have heard of it already,” he says, sitting in a makeshift office on the dive platform. On the table is an espresso machine he proudly tells me is the same model featured in The Life Aquatic, Wes Anderson’s irreverent homage to the marine explorer Jacques Cousteau.
Foley is a 52-year-old American with a genial manner and a sense for the dramatic. He trained with the oceanographer Bob Ballard, who discovered the Titanic, and he now specializes in exploring underwater vessels of all types, from planes to submarines. He spent several years excavating a first-century B.C. cargo ship near the Greek island of Antikythera that sank with clay vessels, coins, bronze and marble artworks, and, most famously, a sophisticated mechanical device described as the world’s oldest “computer.” Before he came to Stora Ekon, he had been working for the U.S. military, recovering the remains of servicemen from crashed World War II bombers, one off Croatia and another off Sweden.
His journey to Stora Ekon began in 2017, after he joined his wife, Maria Hansson, a Swedish geneticist based in Lund, from Massachusetts, where Foley had worked at MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. When his new colleagues told him about Gribshunden, he assumed they were hyping a local attraction. Then he attended a meeting with Rönnby, Eriksson and colleagues from the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen. “They were telling me about the wreck, and I said, Are you kidding me? The only known example of a ship of discovery, the first example of a purpose-built warship—and it’s sitting in just nine meters of water?!”
One facet of the Gribshundenproject is a comprehensive study of the wooden barrels in the ship's hold. Dendrochronology reveals not only when the trees were cut, but where they grew. Chemical and biological analysis may determine the contents of the barrels. Here, Brendan Foley lifts a box containing wooden barrel components from the water, while archaeologists Paola Derudas and Marie Jonsson stand by. Klas Malmberg
The site had already been mapped, and a few artifacts salvaged, including a giant, fearsome figurehead, carved to resemble a monster swallowing a screaming man. But, partly because of the cost, only limited excavations had been carried out. Foley formed a consortium of Swedish and Danish institutions and secured funding from the Crafoord Foundation, founded by the entrepreneur behind Tetra Pak, a multinational food packaging conglomerate, to explore further. In 2019, Foley conducted an initial excavation with Rönnby, who had led several previous studies of the wreck. Foley has been trying to return ever since. Days before work was set to begin this spring, two members of the research team informed Foley they couldn’t join (one was recovering from Covid, another had his visa rejected). Then Foley found himself in the hospital facing emergency surgery for gallstones. “I almost called it off,” he says.
Instead, with his doctors’ approval and orders to follow a strict diet, he went ahead. The international group of experts he’s assembled has set up a white scaffold on the seabed to define their excavation trench, choosing a site near the stern—an educated guess about where the royal quarters were located.
Down on the seabed, Foley and the other divers work in pairs—an archaeologist with a dive specialist. They sift through layers of debris, including firewood and smashed barrels. Farther down, everything is encased in a fine black sediment that “jiggles like jello,” Foley says. To remove it, the archaeologists use trowels or paintbrushes and suck up the resulting debris clouds into the hose of a dredge pump—like a giant vacuum cleaner—to keep the water clear. (Later, they sift through the “dredge pile” to make sure they don’t overlook any items of interest.) They also record every stage of the excavations by taking hundreds of photographs and videos that Paola Derudas, a data specialist from Lund University, builds into 3-D virtual maps of the site. At the ship’s stern, ghostly timbers, covered in marine growth, jut upward out of the silt. Elsewhere, the hull has split open and fallen outward, resulting in a jumble of planks that lie scattered in the green light. “It’s a beautiful mess!” says Mikael Björk, an archaeologist from Sweden’s Blekinge Museum. But once you get to know it, “you get a sense of the ship,” he says. “You can feel the story.”
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