Читать книгу Aztec Treasure House - Evan S. Connell - Страница 12
ОглавлениеKING GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS was of the opinion that building small ships was a waste of young trees, so when he wanted a new flagship to intimidate his enemies he commissioned a monster.
The Vasa was 165 feet long, 40 feet wide, 180 feet from the keel to the tip of the mainmast, and weighed 1,400 tons. She carried sixty-four bronze cannons—forty-eight jutting through a double row of gunports on either side, sixteen smaller ones on the top deck—and she was decorated like an opera house. A gigantic golden lion lunged from the prow, a golden lion’s head roared from every gunport, and both decks were painted bright red so that the sailors’ blood would scarcely be noticed. Above this majestic spectacle floated the orange-yellow and deep indigo colors of seventeenth-century Sweden.
The captain, Söfring Hansson, should have been delighted with such a command, but there were things about the ship that he did not like. He thought the Vasa was too long and narrow and the superstructure uncommonly large. He reported as much to the grand admiral of the Swedish Navy, Klas Fleming, but the admiral did not respond; or, if he did, Captain Hansson was not satisfied.
Consequently, a few weeks before the scheduled launching, Hansson invited Admiral Fleming aboard to witness a test. With the ship tied up at her mooring thirty sailors were told to run across the deck. When they did so the Vasa heeled “by the breadth of one plank.” Hansson immediately ordered them to rush across the deck in the opposite direction. This time the ship heeled by the breadth of two planks. Hansson sent them across the deck a third time and the ship heeled still farther. At this point, according to testimony given during the court-martial, Admiral Fleming ordered the demonstration stopped.
Because the meaning of Captain Hansson’s test was perfectly clear you would assume that preparations for the launching were suspended. After all, it would be insane to continue outfitting a ship for disaster.
But of course the work went right ahead.
The explanation for such a paradox is simple and it will not surprise the good student of human affairs. King Gustav had commissioned this vessel. He had selected the builder and personally had approved the plans. Gustav looked forward to the Vasa leading his fleet. Nobody wanted to tell him what was going to happen.
So, about three o’clock one Sunday afternoon in August of 1628, while thousands of Stockholm citizens crowded the wharves to wish her Godspeed, Captain Hansson gave orders to cast off. The Vasa had been loaded with 2,000 barrels of food, plenty of beer and cannonballs, 133 sailors, assorted bureaucrats and politicians, and a good many wives and children. There may also have been 300 soldiers aboard; the Vasa was to carry them, but perhaps they were ashore. They may have been at Älvsnabben, waiting to get on when the visitors got off.
It is said that a mild breeze was blowing across the harbor that afternoon, yet the Vasa listed farther than expected when the first sails were broken out. As she righted herself the chief ordnance officer, Erik Jönsson, ran below to make certain the cannons were lashed in place.
A few minutes later a gust of wind blew around the high cliffs of Söder and the Vasa heeled sharply. Again she righted herself, but Captain Hansson ordered the topsails cut loose.
The wind dropped. The ship moved heavily toward Beckholmen.
Then a fresh gust struck the sails and for the second time Jönsson ran below. Water was pouring through the open gunports. He gave orders to untie the cannons on the lower side and to haul them up the slanting deck, but this was impossible. Several cannons broke loose, crushing the sailors who unwisely had tried to push them.
The Vasa went down almost at once and came to rest nearly upright on the bottom, her mainmast angling above the surface and Sweden’s banner fluttering valiantly in the sunshine. She had traveled less than a mile.
About fifty people drowned. Many more would have been lost except that the giant ship was accompanied by a fleet of pleasure boats which picked up survivors.
Captain Hansson, along with every other officer, was arrested that same afternoon. Also arrested were those involved with the construction—excluding the designer, a Dutchman named Henrik Hybertsson who had died the previous year.
On September 5 a formal inquiry opened. The official record seems to have been destroyed, though we do not know whether this was deliberate or accidental. However, copies of certain parts of it have been found so that the procedure, as well as quite a few names and details, can be established. We know there were seventeen members of the court including six councilors of the realm, two naval captains, and the lord mayor of Stockholm. The president was Lord High Admiral Carl Gyllenhielm, King Gustav’s half brother.
The court’s first purpose was to determine the cause of the disaster, then to fix the blame. Yet it becomes obvious that while they did want to know why the ship went down they were more anxious to learn who was responsible. The suspects may or may not have been aware of this priority; if they were, they must have felt uncomfortable because seventeenth-century punishment was no pat on the wrist.
For instance, according to Swedish naval articles of 1644, a helmsman who ran his ship aground could be keel-hauled, which meant being towed underwater from stem to stern. Or he might be dragged from port to starboard by way of the keel. The penalty for causing a fire aboard ship was more direct: the guilty man was promptly thrown into the flames. Less serious offences, such as whispering during a lecture, brought fourteen days in irons. Nor does there seem to have been much plea bargaining.
If records of the Vasa inquiry are accurate, the first crew member of any importance to be narrowly questioned was the ordnance officer, Erik Jönsson. After testifying that the cannons had been secured and could not have rolled across the deck, causing the Vasa to capsize, Jönsson added that he thought the ship “was heavier over than under.” It would have capsized in any event, he said.
Admiral Gyllenhielm asked why he had not discussed this with the captain.
Jönsson replied that he was an artilleryman and pretended to be nothing else. The captain, he said, should be better able to judge whether the ship was properly ballasted.
Gyllenhielm pointed out that the ship’s builder had said that if he had been informed the ship was top-heavy he would have recommended loading her down another foot.
How could that have been done, Jönsson asked, when the gunports already lay but three feet from the surface?
Lieutenant Petter Gierdsson, who had been in charge of rigging, told the court that he, too, considered the ship top-heavy. When asked why he had kept this opinion to himself he replied that ballast was something about which he knew nothing. He did not even know what sort of ballast the Vasa carried. He had been concerned only with the rigging.
Jöran Matsson, sailing master, was formally charged with having paid too little attention to the ballast “and other things as his calling and office made incumbent upon him, whereby disaster had befallen His Majesty’s ship.”
Matsson answered that he had stowed as much ballast as possible. Furthermore, he said, he personally had supervised this work. He had gone down into the bilge with a light to inspect the loading. He felt that he had done whatever was incumbent upon him.
Did he notice that the ship was top-heavy?
Matsson then revealed what everybody in Stockholm except the high officers of the court must have known—that while the Vasa was still at her mooring Captain Hansson, in the presence of Admiral Fleming, had ordered a capsizing test. Matsson then repeated a short discussion between himself and the admiral in which the admiral said that the ship rode too low in the water because of so much ballast. To this criticism Matsson had replied: “God grant that she’ll stay on an even keel.” And to this Admiral Fleming replied: “The builder has built ships before. You need not worry about it.”
After questioning several other people the court summoned the builder, Hein Jacobsson. He had not begun the work, but he had completed it after the death of Henrik Hybertsson. He was asked why he had made the Vasa so narrow. He answered that he had not laid the keel, he had only finished what already was begun. Furthermore, King Gustav had approved the plans. There were no blueprints in the seventeenth century, merely a table known as a “sert” which listed the principal dimensions and which was regarded also as a contract to build. Hybertsson had drawn this sert, said Jacobsson, in accordance with the king’s wishes.
Arent Hybertsson de Groot, the original builder’s brother, was questioned. Why, he was asked, did the Vasa have such a large superstructure?
His Majesty had approved it, said de Groot. And all who saw or inspected the ship had agreed that she was irreproachably built.
If that is true, asked the court, why did she capsize?
“God must know,” de Groot answered. “His Majesty the King was told by me how long and how broad the ship was, and His Majesty was pleased to approve and wished to have it so.”
The court probed this delicate situation. Although the king had approved the sert, should not the builder in good conscience have informed His Majesty as to the correct dimensions?
Neither Jacobsson nor de Groot would argue. Both of them replied: “The King wished it so.”
Too many footsteps led toward Gustav’s palace. The inquiry ended without establishing a cause and without finding anyone responsible—as far as we know.
If that actually is how the investigation concluded, it’s hard to believe. Could everybody be innocent? Fifty people were drowned, either through incompetence or negligence; therefore somebody must be guilty. Yet whom would you convict?
The ordnance officer? Beyond doubt the cannons were tied down. Even if they were not, they couldn’t have been the cause.
The sailing master? Unquestionably he checked the ballast. Furthermore, he had spoken to Admiral Fleming about the ship’s instability.
The builder? He didn’t plan the Vasa, he only completed it.
The designer, Henrik Hybertsson?—because it was he who drew the sert and laid the keel. Would you accuse and convict a dead man?
Or perhaps Captain Hansson? He, more than anyone else, had been worried. He had demonstrated very clearly to Admiral Fleming what might happen.
Would you charge Admiral Fleming? He had no part in constructing the ship, nor in the sailing, though he could have prevented the launching. That is, he might have suggested this to his superior, Lord High Admiral Gyllenhielm.
Did Fleming in fact suggest it? We don’t know. Yet even if the records were complete they would not likely settle the question. Powerful men seldom expose themselves, as we have learned these past few years. Their fortunes depend too closely on the fortunes of their associates. That could be why Fleming was not charged with negligence.
Let us suppose he did urge his superior to cancel the launching and Gyllenhielm refused. Would you then charge the presiding officer of the investigative court? How many men in Gyllenhielm’s position would take such a risk?—because surely it would earn the king’s wrath. Gustav himself had approved the ship. He was most anxious for the Vasa to be launched.
Well then, the king. Gustav himself must be at fault. But who would be foolish enough to accuse the king?
What a shame the records are incomplete. How many scenes from this eerily familiar drama were lost? Did the court choose a scapegoat? Perhaps a sailor was flogged to death.
Alas, without the full account we can only speculate, and the vaporous conclusion remains not quite believable—until we reflect that, given a change of centuries and circumstances we might be reading yesterday’s newspaper. Ask yourself what punishment was administered for the crime at My Lai. Consider what happened. More than 100 civilians were shot by American soldiers: a fact as obvious as Old Glory. Yet the American government, in view of an expectant nation and most of the world, could not find anybody guilty. Years after the massacre one lieutenant was restricted to his barracks for a while, that was all. One lieutenant could not go dancing.
And why was nobody guilty? Because everybody was following orders. The king wished it so.
In other words, nothing changes. As the French aphorism tactfully reminds us: “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.”
Well, even before the inquiry opened, almost before the Vasa touched bottom, scavengers were descending on Stockholm: a Dutch shipwright, a Scottish baron, a “mechanicus” from Riga, somebody named “Classon,” “a man from Lubeck,” and various others.
First to obtain permission from the privy council was an Englishman, Ian Bulmer, who started to work less than three days after the catastrophe. He strung ropes from the Vasa’s masts to shore, hitched up teams of horses, and managed to pull the ship into a vertical position. What he planned to do next is not known, but the scheme failed and he either quit or was replaced.
For a while Admiral Fleming took charge. In July of 1629 he notified King Gustav: “As far as Vasa is concerned, we have been working with all industry, trying to raise her, but until now we have accomplished little . . . I have again fixed seventeen stout hawsers and chains with which, this week, if weather permits, we shall try to see what can be done. It is a heavier weight down there than I could have supposed.”
Some time after that the Scottish baron, Alexander Forbes, obtained the rights to all salvage operations in Swedish waters for a period of twelve years, though he knew nothing about marine salvage. When he was unable to raise the Vasa he leased the rights to a syndicate that included a Swedish colonel named Hans Albrekt von Treileben. Hans must have been a clever fellow; not only did he jiggle Baron Forbes out of the picture, be managed to get control of the salvage rights and then he went after the prize with a diving bell.
This recent invention, which resembled a church bell, was about four feet high and made of lead. The diver wore gloves, two pairs of leather boots, leather pants, a leather jacket lashed around his body to make it waterproof, and a wool cap. He stood on a platform slung beneath the bell and as he descended the water came up to his chest, leaving a pocket of compressed air at the top. He had a pair of pincers, a hooked pole, and some rope.
It seems impossible that a man with these elementary tools, inside a lead bell in frigid muddy water almost up to his neck, could accomplish much; yet the syndicate divers tore apart the Vasa’s superstructure and brought up about fifty cannons, most of which were sold abroad. Von Treileben then lost interest and began making plans for a voyage to the West Indies where he hoped to pick the bones of a Spanish galleon.
A man named Liverton, or Liberton, arrived in 1683 with a “special invention.” After being granted a license he recovered one cannon, which he tried unsuccessfully to sell to the Swedish government. That seems to have been the last salvage attempt.
It was now fifty-five years since Gustav’s monster went down. The tip of the mast had rotted away, or had been sawed off, so that nothing broke the surface. The Vasa was a hulk sinking imperceptibly deeper into the mud. And to the surprise of elderly citizens there were adults who never had heard of the famous ship.
How could it be forgotten? If you consider her size and prestige and splendor, as well as that spectacular maiden voyage—to say nothing of the evasive inconclusive court-martial which must have been talked about for many years—how could people forget the Vasa?
But of course it’s naïve to think like that. A nation is not anxious to remember its tragic miscalculations. Germany has been unable to forget Hitler, yet you can be sure that today’s German children do not think of him as their grandparents do, and by the long measuring rod of history the Nazi war has just ended. America cannot forget Vietnam, but be patient. Several centuries from now—unless our omniscient Pentagon does something cataclysmically stupid—you should be able to read American history without once encountering that painful word.
So, as debris stopped floating to the surface and mud built up against the hulk, and those who knew about the calamity died, the Vasa disappeared. Until at last there came a pleasant Sunday afternoon when the wharves were crowded with Stockholm citizens, none of whom could have told you anything at all about King Gustav’s benighted flagship.
In 1920 a Swedish historian was searching the archives for information about another seventeenth-century ship—the Riksnyckeln, which had sailed into a cliff one dark September night—when he came across the minutes of the Vasa court-martial and a reference to Treileben’s diving bell. Being an historian he naturally wrote a paper about it, and a boy named Anders Franzén heard about the Vasa because his father happened to read what the historian had written.
Now, the Franzéns usually vacationed on the island of Dalarö and there Anders saw a wooden gun carriage salvaged from the warship Riksäpplet which foundered in 1676. Although the gun carriage had been submerged more than two centuries the wood was still solid. This fact did not mean anything to him until 1939 when he took a boat trip with his father through the Göta Canal on Sweden’s west coast. There he saw the skeleton of another old ship, but its wood was spongy—eaten by the insatiable shipworm, Teredo navalis.
Given two long-submerged pieces of wood, one solid and one soft, most of us would say how curious and move on to something livelier. Young Franzén, however, did not let go. He thought there must be a reason for the discrepancy. The reason turned out to be Teredo navalis, which likes the taste of salt water. The Baltic around Stockholm has a salinity of 0.7 percent at most. Teredo navalis requires a minimum of 0.9 percent.
Again, after noting this tedious fact, most of us would move along. Not so young Franzén.
The Second World War interrupted his plans, but with that out of the way he began to get organized. He listed fifty ships known to have gone down in the vicinity of Stockholm. From this list he chose twelve: Sastervik, Resande Man, Vasa, Mars, Schwan of Lübeck, Riksäpplet, Kronan . . .
He started with the Riksäpplet because he knew approximately where to look, and because the ship had foundered in shallow water. He found it without much trouble, but he was too late. Very little remained. For 200 years the hulk had been crushed by drifting ice and waves. However, the few planks that he brought up were as solid as the gun carriage.
Franzén decided to hunt for the Vasa. Other ships might be easier to locate but this one sounded important.
He talked to Professor Nils Ahnlund, the historian, and after having learned to read seventeenth-century script he spent as much time as possible—by now he was a petroleum engineer—searching the naval archives. At last he knew the names of the men who had built the ship and those who had sailed it, and he knew quite a lot about the salvage attempts. But what he needed most, which he could not find, was a precise reference to the location of the ship. The Vasa, if it still existed, lay somewhere in Stockholm Ström “toward Lustholmen, Blochusudden, near Danuiken.”
By 1953, having read enough old documents to fill a closet, he was ready. This meant cruising back and forth across an expanse of Stockholm harbor in a motorboat, week after week, sweeping the bottom with wire drags and grapnels. In plain view of anybody who cared to watch he dredged up a great many lost, stolen, or undesirable artifacts: automobile tires, rusty bicycles, stoves, bedsteads, tangled fishing line, Christmas trees, goggles, boots, dead cats, chains, bottles—jetsam of the city.
This is not a job for a man sensitive to ridicule, especially when it becomes known that the man in the motorboat is hunting for a seventeenth-century battleship.
That winter he read another stack of musty documents, and he found an eighteenth-century map on which a cross had been drawn near Stadsgårdskajen. The cross allegedly marked the position of the Vasa, so Franzén spent the following summer cleaning that part of the harbor bottom.
Came winter, back to the library.
Summer, sweeping the harbor.
By this time Stockholm’s authentic fishermen must have stopped laughing and merely tapped their heads while Franzén reeled in his latest catch.
During the winter of 1956, once again in the archives sifting flaky old records, he came upon a letter from the Swedish parliament addressed to King Gustav, dated August 12, 1628. Gustav had been leading an army through Poland when the Vasa was launched. This letter was parliament’s report to the sovereign:
“And on that fateful Sunday, which was the tenth of this month, the Vasa set sail. But it happened that she got no further than Beckholmsudden, where she entirely fell on her side and sank to the bottom with cannon and all else, and lies in eighteen fathoms. . . .”
Beckholmsudden was doubly significant because while hauling up rubbish in that area Franzén had encountered a long muddy obstruction. Government engineers had told him it was rock blasted out of the island when a dry dock was built, so he had not investigated the strange hump. Now he went back to it, equipped with an instrument he had devised—a steel cylinder with a hollow punch in the front end. He threw this instrument overboard, waited until it struck bottom, and reeled it up. Inside the cylinder he found a plug of old black close-grained oak.
He dropped the cylinder at intervals along the length of the hump. Each time it brought back a plug of oak. So there could be no doubt that a wooden ship of Vasa’s dimensions lay on the bottom, very close to the navy diving school.
Franzén did not attempt to claim the ship for himself. He went to the navy, displayed his oak samples, told them what he suspected was there, and asked them to send a man down.
It is easy to guess what would have happened under these circumstances in the United States. After making an appointment and waiting in an air-conditioned lounge the applicant would have been ushered into the office of a lieutenant who would have listened with somnolent courtesy, looked at the plugs, and thanked the visitor for bringing this matter to his attention. The lieutenant might then dictate a brief report which, in due course, would be forwarded to the executive officer of the base, who might conceivably mention it to the commanding officer; and if the commandant happened to be feeling adventurous he might instruct his executive officer to forward a copy to Washington where it would have dried and curled until it resembled the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The Swedes, after listening to Franzén’s story, dispatched their most experienced diver.
Chief Diver Per Edvin Fälting went down and reported that he had landed in mud up to his chest. He could not see anything.
Franzén suggested trying another area.
Just then Fälting said that he had felt what might be a wooden wall. It was a big wall, he said, possibly the side of a ship. Fälting then climbed partway up and discovered a square hole—almost certainly a gunport. Higher on the wall he felt another square hole, which meant that he was clinging to the Vasa because no other ship with a double row of gunports had been lost in Stockholm harbor.
Everybody got excited. Here was a relic of the days when Sweden had been a formidable power, when every nation in Europe listened apprehensively to King Gustavus Adolphus.
A television camera dipped into the water to prove to the Swedes that what they had been told was there actually was there. And indeed it was. The camera relayed a blurred, sinister image of the giant warship: upright, sealed to the waterline in hard clay. The stubs of her masts thrust violently toward the surface. In the muck that covered her decks lay the tangled chains and irons of seventeenth-century scavengers.
Millions of kronor later the Vasa had been pried from the mud, lifted a few feet by two gigantic pontoons, and very cautiously towed like an implausible submarine to nearby Castle Island where, in shallow water, the deposit of centuries was scraped off.
And what came to the surface, dragged from the grasp of The Old One—Den Gamle—was at times unexpected and beautiful and wondrous: gilded carvings of cherubs, musicians, caryatids, mermaids, tritons, knights, dragons, heraldic devices, a bird with an eel in its beak, a man in a rippling cloak, Hercules with the hellhound Cerberus chained at his feet, the god Nereus, King David playing a lyre.
But more often what came up was useful and ordinary and pathetic: mugs, clay pipes, a pocket sundial, a cockaded felt hat, ramrods, axes, smashed beer kegs, tankards, leather boots, pottery, wood bowls, casks of butter, carpenters’ tools, muskets, ladles, a slipper, a bronze candlestick, one blue Dutch picture plate showing a bird on a rock, an apothecary’s kit, a gold signet ring from which the seal was missing, a seaman’s ditty box, another little box holding a lock of hair. Many such personal items Den Gamle released, after being urged by the suction hose.
On the deck beside Captain Hansson’s dining table, among shards of crockery that must have fallen when the Vasa heeled, lay a tightly stoppered flask containing some dense, dark liquid. When Eisenhower visited Sweden in 1962 he was offered a taste. Ike, not a reckless man, observed and sniffed Captain Hansson’s schnapps but declined a drink.
And the great lion figurehead—carved from limewood, weighing two tons, springing toward the enemy—this mighty sculpture was raised from the bottom.
Den Gamle also permitted a number of skeletons to be taken from his ship, most of them still attached to their clothing, and scientists learned that there had been at least two ethnic types aboard. The skulls of one man and one woman were short, with conspicuous cheekbones, suggesting that they were Finnish. The other skulls were typically Nordic. One skull held the residue of a brain.
Among the crew members there had been a man in his late twenties or perhaps thirty, judging by the bones. A scientist who worked on the project had this to say about him: “He was dressed in a knit vest of thick wool and knit wool trousers which showed folds above the hips and were apparently fastened below the knees. Over the vest he wore a long-sleeved jacket with pleated coattails. Under the vest he wore a linen shirt. A pair of sandals and sewn linen stockings completed his dress. A sheath and a knife with a bone handle, as well as a leather money bag, were fastened to his belt. A few coins were in his trousers pockets. Altogether he had about twenty öre in copper money.”
In 1628 you could buy a chicken for twenty öre. One chicken and maybe a drink of rum. That was what the sailor had in his pocket when the Vasa capsized—enough to buy a chicken. A swallow of rum, perhaps, with a chicken for lunch, or a moment in the arms of a pretty girl.
What else is there to say? Given a description of his clothes, given those coppers in his pocket, we could just about summarize a sailor’s life to the hour of his death. And we know when that occurred: August 10, 1628, not long after three in the afternoon, while King Gustavus Adolphus marched fearlessly through Poland.
