Third Day in Stockholm

The Vasa Museum

This is the Vasa Museum.

This is the Vasa.

You remember King Gustav II from yesterday’s post. He led the Protestant forces to victory against the despised Catholics in the Thirty Years War. He was Sweden’s greatest king and was largely responsible for Sweden becoming a world power. After he died his daughter ruled Sweden as the Protestant Queen Christina. After twelve years of being Queen, she got tired of the steady diet of pickled herring and Swedish meatballs at the castle. She abdicated the throne, converted to Catholicism, hauled all the art, jewels and furniture out of the castle and loaded them onto a fleet of nine ships and sailed to Rome, where she learned to cook a mean bolognese sauce and lived happily ever after. Not exactly something that is causing King Gustav II to say with pride: “That’s my girl!” At least the Danes got a good chuckle out of the whole affair.

So King Gustav II did not have an entirely unblemished record even before we consider the Vasa. Vasa is the name of King Gustav’s family dynasty. The King decided to build the world’s biggest most heavily armed ship of war and name it the Vasa. Sounds like a good idea so far. He hired a Dutchman to build the ship and this Dutchman was so confident in his inherent shipbuilding prowess that he refused to draw up plans for the ship. He decided to wing it and figured everything would work out in the end. The shipbuilder died halfway through construction and his wife, who now owned the shipyard, had to hire another shipbuilder to finish the job. So far, not so good. While this is going on King Gustav is in Poland fighting the Poles. It seems like someone is always fighting the Poles. Anyway, King Gustav can’t mind his own business, fighting the Poles, and tried to micromanage the construction of the ship from Poland, never mind the fact that he knows nothing about building a ship.

The Vasa is completed in 1628. With great fanfare this mighty ship left the dock, sailed for 20 minutes, and after covering only 1000 yards a slight breeze blew it over and it sank. This established a world record for the shortest maiden voyage that stands to this day. A court of inquiry could not figure out why the ship sank. They must have missed the fact that the the gun ports were right at the waterline. If the ship heeled over just a little bit, water would come cascading in through the open gun ports and sink the ship.

In 1971 the Swedes found the ship at the bottom of the harbor in Stockholm. If I were the Swedes I would have left it there in the hope that the whole Vasa debacle would at some point be forgotten. Instead, they spent hundreds of millions of dollars raising this symbol of Swedish shipbuilding ineptitude out of its watery grave, preserving it for posterity and building a wonderful museum to house and display it. Bravo Sweden!

If you want to see a Swede get red in the face just mention the maiden voyage of the good ship Vasa. If you want to have a good laugh with a Dane, do the same.

Sara and I spent three and a half hours at the Vasa Museum. Definitely time well spent.

When we got out of the museum we were starved. We found a nice restaurant at a boat harbor and enjoyed a leisurely lunch. Sara had hake, which is like halibut, and I had roast lamb, which is like roast lamb. After lunch we took a long walk along the shore and then took a streetcar back to the hotel.

Dinner

We decided to give the tapas place that I mentioned in yesterday’s blog post, STHLM Tapas, another chance and we are glad we did. It was soooo good!

We had goat cheese, scampi, lamb chops, dates wrapped in bacon, fried dumplings, crayfish, calamari, portobello mushrooms and charcuterie. All small tapas portions so not a great deal of food but all these dishes were a treat for the taste buds.

I hope everyone had a good day today.

Goodnight from Stockholm.