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The Vasa Ship: Sweden’s Age of Greatness

WHEN OTTO III MADE HIS DESCENT INTO THE TOMB OF Charlemagne at Aachen, in the year 1000, the great emperor and founder of modern Europe had been dead for almost two centuries. On entering the mausoleum, the young man found Charles seated on a throne, a golden crown on his head and in his gloved right hand a sceptre. The fingernails had grown through the gloves and wrapped themselves like talons around the head of the wand. The hair beneath the crown had also continued to grow for some time after the onset of brain death, but the body was otherwise remarkably well-preserved, the only real sign of decay being the missing tip of the nose. The young man, having obviously been apprised of this by some previous and unrecorded reconnaissance descent, replaced it with a shaped nugget of gold. He also trimmed the corpse’s hair and cut its nails. Before leaving and closing up the tomb, he removed a single tooth from Charlemagne’s mouth, no doubt in the hope that it possessed some magical power that might work in his favour. Alas it did not, and less than two years later he was dead himself, the victim of a smallpox epidemic.

If Frederik’s search for the earthly remains of Gorm the Old might – beneath a veneer of scientific archaeological interest – have been motivated by a similar hope that some tiny physical remnant would magically invert all the failing fortunes of Denmark then he was disappointed. A document that might have brought him some compensatory comfort did emerge in the year of his death; but it was too late and too far away for him to know of its existence. While restoring a volume of fifteenth-century devotional works a librarian named Albert Lemarchand, in the library of the town of Angers, in western France, came upon four quarto pages of parchment that had been used to pad its binding. The parchment was in good condition and the pages copiously annotated and corrected. They were not finally identified until 1877, when a linguist named Gaston Paris recognized them as an extract from the Gesta Danorum. Expert analysis indicated that these pages were from Saxo’s original Latin manuscript and that the annotations were his own. Once their historical value had been realized, the pages became the property of the Danish state, in exchange for a French manuscript.

Regardless of the fluctuations in their status as a European power, the Danes had always held this great history book as evidence of their pedigree and past. Along with Harald Bluetooth’s Jelling Stone, the Gesta Danorum was the second great pillar upon which the Danish state rested as a historical entity. The Norwegians had their Heimskringla, even though its author was the Icelander Snorri Sturluson. Snorri honoured the Swedish Yngling family in the ‘Ynglingasaga’ chapter of the Heimskringla as the dynasty from which all later kings in Scandinavia should claim descent if they wished to be thought legitimate; and yet the Swedes had no single great work of their own that could bear comparison with the literary monuments of their Scandinavian neighbours. The long and rich tale of the Swedish past could only be told by putting together the telegrammatic and often enigmatic inscriptions on the runestones and picture-stones scattered throughout the country, and the uncertain fictions of a handful of mythological-historical sagas like the Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks (The Saga of Hervör and Heidrek).

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By the late seventeenth century, this lack of a respectable cultural monument had become pressing for the Swedes. In many ways, the Swedish Empire that arose over the seventeenth century between 1611 and 1718, a period known as Stormaktstiden or ‘Great Power Era’, was a long-term result of the military energy unleashed in the process of breaking free from Danish regional domination. The Swedish revolt against the Kalmar Union that began in 1434 and reached a climax in the Stockholm Bloodbath of 1520, independence in 1523 and the break with the Church of Rome in the 1530s set in train a fierce rivalry for supremacy in the region. From a military point of view the Swedes faced a daunting task to assert themselves, ringed around as they were by Danish possessions in the Baltic, in Skåne, the southernmost region of the Scandinavian peninsula, the Jutland peninsula in the south, and in the west a border with Norway that was under the control of Denmark.

Control of the Baltic was the first essential of national security. The Swedes, building on their possession of Finland, emerged as victors in a three-way struggle between Sweden, Poland and Russia for possession of the Baltic states. Sweden’s right to Estonia was recognized by the Treaty of Teusina in 1595.

Over the next few years there was a steady stream of military triumphs, strategic alliances and acquisitions. The balance of power began to tip during the reign of Gustavus Adolphus II (1611–32) and shifted decisively in Sweden’s direction during the Thirty Years’ War, the last great religious war in Europe, in which the historically Roman Catholic states ranged themselves against the newly created Protestant states of northern Europe, with Germany as the devastated battleground. His hand was forced by the series of defeats inflicted on Protestant Denmark by the Austrian Holy Roman Emperor, and by Emperor Ferdinand’s Edict of Restitution (1629), which divested Protestants of all Church lands taken or acquired since the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, a move that seemed to presage the extinction of state Protestantism. Gustavus Adolphus’s entry into the war gained him a reputation as the great defender of Protestantism, a kind of Lutheran equivalent in terms of political and religious responsibilities to the Catholic Emperor himself. As the long and bitter struggle twisted on into the middle of the seventeenth century, its various staging posts and treaties brought Sweden a foothold on the north German coast, east of the Jutland peninsula, a possession it was able to exploit to great tactical advantage in the Torsteinsson War of 1643, and again during the Swedish wars of 1657 to 1660.

Charles X, who succeeded Gustavus Adolphus’s daughter Kristina when she abdicated in 1654, was able to respond to a Danish declaration of war in 1657 by bringing his army up through northern Germany to occupy Jutland, the continental-mainland element of the oddly dimensioned Kingdom of Denmark. He completed the rout of the Danes with a manoeuvre of extraordinary daring and imagination, marching his troops across the thick ice that had frozen the waters in the straits of the Lillebælt and Storebælt (the Little and Large belts) during that exceptionally cold winter to occupy Sjælland–Zealand. This piece of tactical boldness and brilliance paid the highest possible dividends at the Peace of Roskilde in 1658, at which Denmark was forced to concede Skåne, Blekinge, Halland and Bohuslän in the east of Norway, and the island of Bornholm. Emboldened by the almost shocking speed of these gains, Charles declared war on Denmark a mere six months later, intending this time to complete the conquest of the entire country. A siege of Copenhagen that showed no sign of succeeding indicated that things would not go so smoothly this time; and when Charles died suddenly and unexpectedly of natural causes in 1660, at the age of thirty-eight, the ambitious plan to unite all of Scandinavia under the Crown of Sweden was abandoned forever.

Charles’s son and successor Charles XI, after thwarting a Danish attempt to recapture Skåne, devoted his energies to mending the royal finances, which had been greatly weakened following Gustavus Adolphus’s cultivation of the Swedish aristocracy’s support for the Thirty Years’ War, a policy that had involved transferring ownership of a vast number of Crown estates into private hands. A programme known as the ‘Reduction’ reversed many of these grants, while the Swedish parliament further enhanced the king’s power (and correspondingly reduced that of the aristocracy) by decreeing that the king need only consult the Council for advice if he felt the need for it. With further adjustments, the Swedish monarchy had become absolute by 1689, and the king ruled by the Grace of God alone. The power of the old, land-owning aristocracy was broken, passing instead to a new class of paid civil servants.

Charles’s son and heir, Charles XII, presided over a gradual dismemberment of the Swedish Empire, and by 1718 it had shrunk to the smaller and more manageable size that a modest population could sustain. The enduring benefits for Sweden included the disappearance of the long-standing threat to its national security exerted by that arc of Danish possessions stretching up its eastern approaches, a development that also gave Swedes control of the entrance to the Baltic, and with it access to the markets in the east which their ancestors the Rus, the Swedish Vikings, had exploited to such advantage 800 years earlier. The territorial gains also gave Sweden control over the mouths of the great rivers of Germany – the Oder, Elbe and Weser – with the right to collect tolls from those who used them. Sweden, at the height of its Age of Greatness, was twice the size of the present-day country, with Stockholm at its centre and Riga on the far side of the Baltic as its second city. In territorial terms, it was the third-largest country in Europe, after Spain and Russia. But of all these rapidly acquired possessions, the most significant was the acquisition of Skåne. It guaranteed the geographical integrity of modern Sweden.

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Much the most intriguing of Sweden’s monarchs during this hastily assembled greatness was Queen Kristina, the only child of Gustavus Adolphus. She reigned under a regent from the time of her father’s death in 1632 to 1645, and in her own right thereafter until her abdication in 1654. If her own father and the male relatives who succeeded her took care of the military responsibilities involved in the creation and maintenance of this northern European empire, it fell to Kristina to provide it with the cultural identity and attributes proper to a country that had, almost overnight, announced itself as a Great Power. An occasional actress herself, she cultivated the theatre, the arts, music and literature, and she worked consciously to makes hers a sophisticated European court. As a woman of questing intellect, with a deep interest in religion, philosophy and Greek antiquity, she was culturally ambitious for Sweden and keen to mark its new-found status. She must have been delighted when René Descartes, the most celebrated and controversial philosopher of the age, accepted her invitation to join her as resident philosopher at the court in Stockholm.

Hesitant at first, wary of finding himself reduced to a role as the queen’s tutor, Descartes was relieved to discover, once he arrived in Stockholm, that Kristina was genuinely interested in hearing his response to the profoundly existential questions she had already raised with him in the correspondence that had preceded the appointment. They included: ‘Which is worse, the abuse of love or the abuse of hatred?’, ‘What is love, and what are the effects of love and of its opposite, hatred, on a human life?’ and ‘What is the nature of the relationship between ordinary commonsense and religious revelation?’ She also wanted to know whether a ‘natural understanding’ was sufficient for someone to love God; even before his arrival in Stockholm, the deeply modest Descartes had assured her that indeed it was.

By the time he arrived in the Swedish capital late in 1649 Descartes was, at sixty, already an old man by the standards of the day; but he was still pleased to wear a curly wig, embroidered gloves and the long, thin pointed shoes fashionable at the time. For much of his life it had been his habit to spend his mornings in bed, thinking, reading and writing, but this routine became brutally swamped beneath Kristina’s own. As a queen in waiting, she had been disciplined from her childhood to spend ten hours a day in the study of religion, philosophy, Greek, Latin and several modern languages, including German, French and Italian. Happily for her, such discipline suited her temperament, and despite the wealth of new responsibilities that came with her coronation, these habits of study continued into her adult years. Poor old Descartes had to be fitted in somewhere, and that turned out to be 4am daily, in her library – unheated, in what was even for Stockholm an unusually cold winter. There it was his duty to be brilliant and revelatory in discoursing on matters that were, as it turned out, of quite exceptional importance to the queen. Descartes had no doubt been hoping for a more comfortable and less demanding sinecure, but he was sufficiently impressed by Kristina’s obvious sincerity not to mention his personal discomforts. His passionate advocacy of doubt as the only intellectually honourable position possible for an individual in search of answers to the most profound questions changed her life and dramatically reshaped her destiny. As a queen, though, it ruined her and caused consternation and confusion among her countrymen, for as things turned out the daughter of Gustavus Adolphus, Lion of the North, Defender of the Protestant Faith, had somehow survived the childhood indoctrination of her Protestant tutors to find herself increasingly attracted to Roman Catholicism, a faith now so severely proscribed under Swedish law that conversion entailed the loss of all civil rights and automatic expulsion from the country.

These prohibitions meant that Kristina’s journey to Catholicism was undertaken largely in secrecy, and the progress of her convictions is hard to plot. What is certain is that a crucial earlier influence was the French ambassador to Sweden, Pierre Chanut, a rational, civilized, learned and tolerant man, whose very attributes suggested to her that most of what her Protestant tutors had told her about Catholics was exaggeration, prejudice and propaganda. It was through her friendship with Chanut that she first came into contact with Descartes. Whether or not those icy early-morning encounters in the queen’s library took the form of some kind of instruction or intellectual soundings of the queen’s curiosity about Catholicism is an issue that has been much debated; but whatever it was they talked about, there must have been a peculiar intensity to their discussions, as the queen struggled with a growing realization of the impossibility of being the Catholic ruler of a Protestant people. Descartes must have impressed her in the same way as Chanut, exhibiting a brilliant intellect suffused with enough honourable doubt to concede that even rationalism has its limits, and that left him free to adhere rather than cling to his Catholic faith.

If indeed Descartes did have a crucial influence on the queen’s thinking it was a final personal triumph. He suffered dreadfully from the rigours of Kristina’s routine during their first full month as teacher and pupil, that bitterly cold January of 1650. By the time he arrived for their meetings, he would already be frozen to the bone by the coach drive to the palace, and as he walked the last few metres of the way across a little bridge, it seemed to him that in such extreme cold even men’s thoughts must freeze like the water. Protocol required that he remain standing throughout their sessions, his head bare. By early February he was fevered, showing symptoms of pneumonia, and experiencing congestion of the lungs, which he gamely tried to treat with a medication of his own devising: liquid tobacco suspended in heated wine. As February dragged on, his strange concoction appeared to be having some effect, and one day he expressed a desire to get up from his bed and, with the assistance of his manservant Henry Schluter, sit for a while in an armchair. But even this mild exertion proved too much, and he fainted.

It seems he realized the end was close after regaining consciousness, and on 10 February a priest who had arrived to administer the last rites was given permission to proceed by a blinking of the eyes. The following morning, Descartes passed away. Kristina planned a state funeral for him, and burial at Riddarholmen among the kings of Sweden. As a temporary measure, he was buried the day after his death in the cemetery of Adolf Fredrik’s church, with the idea that his body would be moved in the spring. Time and circumstance meant that nothing came of the queen’s plans, and he lay there beneath a simple wooden monument for the next seventeen years, until eventually the body was exhumed and taken back to France. Perhaps his death served in some way to focus Kristina’s dilemma. Within a year of his death, she had made her first documented contact with the Society of Jesus, sending a secret letter through an interpreter at the Portuguese embassy to the Superior General of the Jesuits’ Order in Rome.

In February 1649, more than a year and a half before her coronation in October 1650, Kristina had announced that she was never going to marry and that, moreover, she did not propose ever to offer any explanation for her decision. Five years later, in 1654, she informed the Council of her intention to abdicate, and suggested that with their approval the throne of Sweden be offered to her cousin Karl. Perhaps only because she was a woman, Kristina’s reign now – looked at from the perspective of Scandinavian societies that are characterized to an unusual degree by their promotion of traditionally feminine virtues and values, and in particular a distaste for violence – seems more predictive of modern Sweden than any of her predecessors’ or successors’ during the country’s Great Power century. The quality that, for want of a better word, one might call ‘civilized’ was nowhere better illustrated than in the rituals of her abdication ceremony in 1654. To her own courtiers, advisers and diplomats, the abdication seemed supremely unnatural and tragic; and yet, realizing that there was nothing to be done about it, the situation was formalized in a ceremony of impressive dignity at the royal palace in Uppsala on 5 June. It was a mournful piece of theatre in which, item by item, Kristina was ceremoniously divested of her royal regalia. Everything proceeded smoothly until a courtier named Per Brahe, who had been a close friend to her late father and whose task it was to remove the crown from the queen’s head, remained rooted to the spot when the moment arrived. Kristina flashed him urgent hand signals, beseeching him to step forward and play his part; but when even these failed to sway him, she lifted up her hands and removed the crown herself. The ceremony then continued with the coronation of her cousin as Karl X. Later that same day, Karl made an offer to marry her. It was an offer he had made earlier. Now, as then, she rejected it. Kristina left Sweden later in the summer. At Innsbruck in 1655, she formally converted to Catholicism and began the long, slow journey that would eventually lead her to Rome, where she would spend the remaining thirty-four years of her life.

Kristina had not been a cheap head of state for Sweden. In company with Axel Oxenstierna, the chancellor during her minority years, she had greatly expanded the Swedish aristocracy, handing out titles to barons and counts and selling off Crown lands to pay the appanages of these newly created nobles. Like her invitation to Descartes, it may all have been part of an attempt to give Sweden the style she felt becoming for a major European power.

In the light of her father’s elevation to the rank of Defender of the Protestant Faith, there is a huge irony in Kristina’s conversion to Catholicism. In symbolic terms, I have sometimes thought it might express something close to an aversion to the rapidity of Sweden’s rise from obscure northern nation to major player in the political affairs of northern Europe – a sort of Groucho Marx unease at being a member of a club that would have someone like her as a member. Gustav Vasa had shown a similar ambivalence about the triumphs of the Reformation when he retained the tradition of the Apostolic Succession in appointing bishops to the state Church in Sweden, hinting at a respectful admiration for the very antiquity, values and power which his revolution had overthrown. Was there, at some point in Kristina’s dangerous attraction towards Roman Catholicism – if this is not too doggedly psychoanalytical a point – an expression of shock and regret at the temerity involved in rejecting the time-honoured authority of the Eternal City? Was this her quite private way of atoning for the Reformation? Or did she, with all the wealth of her princely education, become a victim of choice? Did she, like Kierkegaard in Denmark two centuries later, grow weary of the fashion to doubt everything as the default intellectual position? A fashion from which Kierkegaard, in his generalized contempt, gave honourable exemption to the man who started it all, Descartes? As Kierkegaard wrote in Fear and Trembling, quoting Descartes, we must keep in mind that the natural light of reason can be trusted only so long as nothing contrary to it is revealed by God. Above all, he wrote, we should impress on our memory as an infallible rule that what God has revealed to us is incomparably more certain than anything else.

Whatever possible truth there might be in such musings, there can be no denying Kristina’s concern for her immortal soul and her objection to the fact of physical death. A four-page formula, devised by a German chemist named Johann Glauber, was found in her purse after she died. It turned out to be the recipe for an elixir of life, the ‘Balsamo Mercuriale’, to be applied by rubbing around the belly-button. In Kristina’s case it turned out to be as little use as any other potion mixed for the same purpose.*

Kristina had been born with an unusually dense covering of lanugo hair that disguised her sex so effectively that Gustavus Adolphus was initially told he had fathered a son. When the error was corrected, he appeared not to mind, particularly as Kristina turned out to be a tomboyish daughter. In any event, as a princess who was being groomed for the throne she received an education and upbringing that took little account of her sex. Her determinedly unmarried status and the fact that she often dressed like a man and had a deep voice (remarked on many times by contemporaries) have, over the centuries, turned Kristina into a figure of mystery and fascination. In modern times, lesbians and transsexuals have laid claim to her as one of their own. One early Swedish biographer, Curt Weibull, concluded that she might have been what is termed a ‘pseudo-hermaphrodite’, having normal female genitalia but a hidden chromosomal abnormality that complicated her sexual identity. So intense was the interest surrounding the issue that in 1965 an attempt was made to solve the matter. Her body was disinterred from its sarcophagus in the Vatican grotto in Rome, and a medical examination was carried out by Carl-Herman Hjortsjö, a professor of anatomy at Lund University. But as Hjortsjö himself conceded, the physical manifestations of ambiguous gender on the remains of a long-dead person are unidentifiable, and her body was returned to the sarcophagus with no one any the wiser. Kristina herself was aware of these rumours about her sex, which must have been painful for her in their way. In old age, she wrote in her journal that she was ‘neither male nor hermaphrodite, as some people in the world have pass’d me for’. Her life and enigmatic fate have been the subject of a number of novels and films. Strindberg wrote a play about her. Greta Garbo played her in a 1933 Hollywood biopic, dressed in men’s clothing in certain scenes, in one of the film’s few concessions to historical reality.

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The opening of Queen Kristina’s grave in Rome, in 1965. Photograph Hjalmar Gustavsson/Lund University Archives.

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While Kristina spent much of her time as queen trying to create a golden present for imperial Sweden, a man named Olof Rudbeck was working equally hard to give it a golden past. Rudbeck had made his name at the age of twenty with the discovery of the lymphatic system, an impeccably modern contribution in the field of medical science which complemented William Harvey’s discovery that the blood circulates around the body and the human heart is but a pump, a startlingly different understanding from ideas on the subject put forward 2,000 years earlier by the Greek physician Galen that had remained largely unchallenged since his time. Rudbeck’s achievement brought his name to the attention of Queen Kristina and, until her abdication and the death in the same year of her chancellor, Oxenstierna, the statesman and the queen remained his enthusiastic patrons.

Rudbeck, a tall, well-built man with a full beard who wore his hair shoulder-length, was a universal genius of a type that Sweden has been particularly rich in. Emanuel Swedenborg and August Strindberg are well-known examples. In addition to his medical skills Rudbeck was a master fireworks-maker, an architect who designed and built the university’s anatomy theatre at Uppsala, a civil engineer who provided the city with a plumbing system to bring water (via underground pipes) to the doorstep of many central Uppsala households, and a botanist whose Campus Elysii aimed to describe every known plant in the world. This latter task so often took second place to the demands of his other talents that the Campus Elysii was never finished; but even in incomplete form, it earned the praise of his fellow-countryman, the botanist Carl Linné (Linnaeus). Rudbeck was also the creator of a botanical garden intended to display some of the plants described in his book. It was an early example of the interactive approach – you’ve read the book, now visit the garden. His garden required copious watering and was one of the prime beneficiaries of his underground waterworks system. He lectured students in the art of ship-building, played a number of musical instruments, and for the coronation of Charles XI in Uppsala Cathedral in 1675 not only composed the music but sang it himself, with a passion reportedly loud enough to subdue the twelve trumpets and four kettledrums blaring and thrashing away behind him.

But of all these claims for Rudbeck’s polymathic genius none can compare in its scope, its vision, its ingenuity and its sheer weirdness, no less for the Cartesian rigour which he brought to the field, with his discovery that Sweden was the location of Plato’s lost continent of Atlantis, and Swedish the proto-language from which Greek, Latin and Hebrew all derived, just as the pantheon of Greek gods were later improvisations on the gods of Sweden’s Atlantean antiquity – Thor, Odin, Loki, Frey, Freyja. These discoveries were presently embodied in four huge volumes, written in both Latin and Swedish, which appeared between 1679 and 1702. Rudbeck’s strange theories and preoccupations on this subject derived ultimately from a long-standing interest among the Swedes in their Gothic roots, and in a theory proposed in the sixth century AD by the Roman historian Jordanes: that Scandinavia, which Jordanes called Scandza, was the home of those Ostrogoths and Visigoths who flooded south and west across Europe during the Age of Migrations and who, in 410, sacked Rome and brought the Roman Empire in the West to an end. At the Synod of Basel in 1434, the delegate from Sweden claimed the seat of honour, invoking his country’s Gothic past to argue that of all the kingdoms represented, his was the most ancient, the strongest and the most noble.

It was the convulsions of the Reformation and Sweden’s subsequent rapid rise to the status of Great Power that gave real impetus to a revival of the myth that Rudbeck developed to such dizzying extremes. As kings in a line with no historical past the Vasas encouraged any references to the country’s ancient Gothic heritage. The military feats of Gustavus Adolphus in the Thirty Years’ War seemed to echo the triumphs of Gothic kings of the fifth century such as Alaric, who led the sacking of Rome in 410. They were won against the same enemy, too, once Rome became the spiritual seat of Catholic Europe. In his public utterances, the king frequently invoked his Gothic roots and encouraged and sponsored his historians to pursue the line in ever more detail. The very clothes he wore at his coronation at Uppsala in 1617 were in conscious imitation of those known to have been worn by the Gothic King Berik. Among the documentation studied by Swedish historians were a number of Icelandic saga manuscripts, acquired by the University of Uppsala. Although many of these were written no earlier than the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, they were enthusiastically interpreted as reliable historical accounts by students of Sweden’s Gothic past.

A scholar named Olof Verelius, who was preparing an edition of the Saga of Hervör and Heidrek, had asked his versatile friend Rudbeck to provide him with a map of the district around Lake Mälaren. The map was never delivered, for in the course of his work Rudbeck became at first distracted and then literally enchanted by what seemed to him remarkable similarities between the place-names and words he came across in the text of the saga, and the words already familiar to him from his knowledge of Greek, Latin and Hebrew. With a visionary rapidity these homophonous coincidences – of the same order as those that persuaded Snorri Sturluson that the Æsir, the Norse gods, hailed originally from Asia – became a revelation of the roots of a stupendous and fantastical tree, stranger by far than anything growing in his botanical gardens. By the time he had finished watering, nurturing, pruning and training it, he was able to use this extrusion to provide Swedes with incontrovertible proof that Old Uppsala was nothing more nor less than the true location of the lost continent of Atlantis of which Plato had written in the Timaeus and Critias dialogues.

In the summer of 1674, Rudbeck made the first of what would be countless field trips to Old Uppsala, taking with him twelve students whose task it was to carry out measurements of the site and contrast them with measurements of the size of the city and its distance from the sea as given in Plato. When there turned out to be a close correspondence between the two sets of figures, Rudbeck, in near-disbelief, ordered his students to carry out the measurements again. When the same close correspondences were again returned, it seemed to him that he had no choice but to believe. This first breakthrough into the realm of scientific proof was followed by others. He was soon able to give a location for the site of the horse-racing track mentioned in Plato, as well as the temple to Poseidon and Cleito, which he quickly realized must be the same as the one at Old Uppsala described by Adam of Bremen in the Gesta Hammaburgensis: a vast building, its façade framed by a fabulous linked gold chain, its interior walls decked in gold, from which enormous statues of Odin, Frey and Thor stared down at the worshippers as nine males of every species of animal were sacrificed to them in thanks and appeasement. In due course, Rudbeck located not the links themselves but fragments of the chain, embedded in the walls of the Uppsala Church, the oldest Christian church in Sweden. Anything found on the site became, axiomatically, another vital piece in the emerging picture of Sweden’s Atlantean heritage. Presently he opened a museum, where delighted and astonished visitors could see for themselves Atlantean knives, axe-heads, pendants, spinning whorls, pins, nails and arrow-heads.

As Rudbeck’s certainties grew, he moved beyond the realms of archaeology and philology into abstract speculation. By 1678 he was convinced that Sweden had been the home of the gods and demi-gods of antiquity and even offered precise correspondences: Heimdall, the watchman of the Æsir, had metamorphosed into Hermes; Balder became Apollo, Zeus Thor and Odin Hercules. Plato’s statement that Atlantis was located near the Pillars of Hercules, marking the outermost limits of the hero’s great voyage, was commonly held to be a reference to the mountain promontories flanking the entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar. Not so in Rudbeck’s world. By now he was a man deep into the writing of a new kind of novel and had mastered the ability to weave everything, every encounter, every new fact unearthed, into the fabric of his great story. With a simple flick of understanding he moved these rocky pins to the Öresund, content that the translocation better answered Plato’s intention to describe a place that marked the limits of the known world in his time. Consulting maps, Rudbeck found confirmation of his intuition in numerous place-names in the Öresund region that preserved elements of the name Hercules: Herhamber, Herhal and one close to Stockholm called Hercul.

The last of the four volumes of the Atland eller Manheim (translated into Latin as Atlantica) that documented all this was in the process of being printed in May 1702 when a great fire swept through Uppsala and consumed most of the town. Rudbeck’s own house was badly damaged and his inventions, his instruments, his printing press and his cabinet of curiosities lost. Gone, too, were 7,000 completed woodcuts for the Campus Elysii, almost all unsold copies of the Atlantica as well as the partially printed copies of the fourth volume. Yet within a few weeks he was back at work, supervising repairs to the roof of his own house and his neighbours’ houses, organizing the resurrection of the botanical garden, and drafting plans for a complete rebuilding of the town. In the midst of these endeavours, thoroughly burnt out himself, one might suppose, by a lifetime of superhuman dedication to the task of constructing, within the space of a few short years, a golden past worthy of Sweden’s golden present and dismayed by this fiery proof of fate’s brisk indifference to all his efforts, he fell ill and died in his bed on 9 September 1702. Although readers during his lifetime had included such luminaries of contemporary thought as Leibniz, Montesquieu, Pierre Bayle and Sir Isaac Newton, within twenty years of Rudbeck’s death his whole strange balloon had collapsed and fallen back down to earth; and the Swedish Empire it had been launched to glorify and celebrate was gone.

For a time, Rudbeck’s name came to be used as a verb to describe anyone engaged in reckless and uncontrolled speculation: att rudbeckisera, ‘to rudbeck’. But history has not been unkind to him. The sixteen-page entry on his life and work in Volume XXX of the Svenskt Biografiskt Lexicon is respectful and sympathetic. Along with his real contributions to botany and medicine it stresses the intricate strangeness of the poetry he laid across his distinctive and thematically consistent world-historical tale of Sweden’s gothic past, in which facts, dreams, myth and waking life, historical personages, biblical and mythological figures merge and flow and part in a mesmerizing drift that evokes in us the same sense of awestruck and uncomprehending wonder with which we contemplate the later writings of James Joyce.

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Vast and ephemeral as it was, Rudbeck’s Atlantica is too exotic, too strange, too resolutely the product of a quite different way of thinking, a wholly different attitude towards study, to serve as a symbol of Sweden’s remarkable century as a European Great Power. In that context, the curious fate of the great royal ship the Vasa seems a more apt representation, though it took a while for me to understand this.

One’s first impressions on entering the dark, vaulted museum home of the ship on the island of Djurgården, in central Stockholm, are overwhelming. The Vasa is 57 metres (187 feet) long, its afterdeck 17 metres (55 feet) high; the tallest of its three masts towers 49 metres (160 feet) above the keel. A lion leaps from the bowsprit, and the gaping heads of the rest of the pride surround the openings of the gun-ports, so that when the guns were fired they would seem to roar. The stem and stern are a riot of bright and intricate carvings. Twenty-three Gideon’s warriors march across the upper gallery of the stern. There are mermaids, glaring cherubs, heathen gods and goddesses, musicians, more lions, more warriors – it is easy to see that, in every way, this was a ‘king’s ship’, designed to be the pride of Gustavus Adolphus’s navy. Its appointed task, in the political situation of the time, was to secure the Baltic against any German attempt to seize control of the waters.

She had a crew of 145 and space on board for 300 fighting men to see that the job was done. But they never got even close. On Sunday 10 August 1628 the Vasa was launched. Many of Stockholm’s 10,000 inhabitants had made their way down to the docks to watch. Others took to the water in small boats intending to follow her out to the open sea. It was fine day. The wind from the south-west was so light that for the first few hundred metres, until she reached Tranbodarna, the ship had to be towed along. Finally, the moment came when the skipper ordered men aloft to set four of the Vasa’s ten sails, a salute was fired, and she was off and sailing on her maiden voyage. Approaching Beckholmen she was exposed to slightly stronger winds and almost at once began to keel over to the left. She righted herself again, but passing the islet, struck by what Captain Söfring Hansson later described as ‘just a slight gust of wind, no more than a breeze’, she keeled over again and within a matter of minutes, before the astonished eyes of those watching from the shore, she vanished beneath the waves, sunk in 32 metres of water after a voyage of less than 1,300 metres. Fifty lives were lost; most of the survivors managed to swim to land or were picked up by the small craft following.

As soon as they reached shore, the Vasa’s senior officers were arrested. It was assumed that the disaster was the result of some major act of incompetence, such as failing to secure the guns on the lower deck so that all of them trundled over to the same side. Suspicions of drunkenness were raised and quickly ruled out as the simple, dreadful truth emerged: for all her style, her beauty and magnificence, the Vasa was completely unseaworthy. The slight breeze that ruffled her sails as she approached Beckholmen had been enough to dip her down below the waterline and allow the water to come gushing in through the lion-head gun-ports, all of them open and less than a metre above the surface. She was too tall, too narrow, too top-heavy.

Everyone on board either knew it or had suspected as much. No one said a thing. At the hearing, Shipmaster Jöran Mattson described a stability test conducted in the presence of the Admiral of the Fleet, Clas Fleming. Thirty crew members had been lined up and told to run from one side of the ship to the other and back again and the degree of list was then measured in plank widths. As the men were about to embark on a fourth crossing, the admiral stepped forward and raised both hands in the air, palms outward, to bring the exercise to a halt. By their rule-of-thumb form of measuring, the ship had listed a full plank for each time the deck was crossed. Had we carried on, Matsson told the board of enquiry, the Vasa would have capsized on the spot. He said he had tried to discuss the problem with Fleming but that the admiral’s only response was that the shipbuilder had built ships before, so he must surely know his own business. Beneath his breath Matsson heard him mutter ‘If only His Majesty were at home!’ But Gustavus Adolphus was away in Prussia on military business and did not learn of the fate of his beautiful new flagship until two weeks later. When he did so, he too made an immediate presumption of incompetence or negligence and insisted that the guilty parties be found and punished. And yet, as successive witnesses could testify, the king himself had been a party to the ship’s design and had approved it at every stage. Indeed, the unusually large number of heavy cannon on board had been at his specific instruction. ‘Well then, whose fault it is?’ asked a member of the board of enquiry. The lease-holder at Skeppsgården, a man named Arent de Groot, scratched his chin and replied that God alone knew the answer to that question. And since neither God nor the king could conceivably have any fault in the matter, the board discharged itself without ever finding anyone guilty of anything.

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The diving bell used in the salvage of the Vasa ship. Author’s collection.

Salvage operations began three days after the ship sank. A team led by the English expert Ian Bulmer succeeded in raising the Vasa to an upright position on the seabed on the first day at work, but were then unable to build on their achievement. A succession of adventurers, few of them Swedish, followed, contracted to attempt what was considered the most important part of the salvage, the recovery of the large number of new, bronze cannon, each weighing up to a ton, now languishing uselessly on the seabed. They were no more successful than Bulmer had been. Not until the 1660s, with Gustavus Adolphus long dead and Queen Kristina a private citizen living in Rome, was the problem of how to retrieve these guns eventually solved by two professional salvage experts, a Swede from Värmland named Albrecht von Treileben and his German business partner Andreas Peckell. At some point in their travels they had come across a new invention, the diving bell, and been sufficiently impressed by its potential to invest in one of their own.

It was this technological wonder that finally revealed to me, on subsequent visits, the sense and even the glory in the whole Vasa museum project, which had at first visit seemed such an odd celebration of incompetence and failure, as inappropriate as asking members of the public to admire the beauties of a raised and restored Titanic. A life-size copy of the diving bell is among the many sideshows in the museum’s great hall. When I visit now I always head straight for it and am each time struck by the same rare sense of admiration for the ingenuity, the fortitude, the bravery and determination of the human race. Each time I contemplate it, I never fail to recall the remarkable account left by an Italian traveller named Francesco Negri, a priest travelling in Scandinavia who happened to be passing through Stockholm in October 1663.

Negri was staying in the city with friends, and in the course of their conversation he learned of the performance that was mesmerizing the whole of Stockholm that year: the sight of a man who was able to ‘walk under the water’. Negri expressed an interest in seeing the miracle for himself and was duly taken to the site of the salvage operation at Strömmen. As their small craft approached the place of salvage, Negri says, they saw a small boat at anchor, an inelegant, battered, sturdy little vessel ringed around by a number of other small bobbing boats. This battered little craft had all manner of mysterious clutter strewn across its deck – thick cables, block and tackle, and several metal poles with hooks on the end that reminded him of shepherd’s crooks. He learned, either first hand in conversation with Peckell or had the information conveyed to him by his hosts, that the divers were attempting to bring up the guns from the sunken ship, followed by all the ballast; after that, his informant believed, it would be a relatively simple matter to raise the hull itself. Pointing to the array of variously hooked and tipped poles, Peckell explained that the purpose of them was to rip away the planking around the gun-ports to make it easier to get at the cannons.

In his account Negri then goes on to consider the diving bell itself, which stands on a raft floating just next to the battered little vessel. This bell seems to him a remarkable invention. It enables a man to descend beneath the surface of the water and remain there for up to half an hour at a time. Although the design is not new – von Treileben introduced this fantastic piece of equipment as early as 1658, following a number of successful trials on the west coast – this is the first time it has been seen in use in the waters around Stockholm. Negri learns that the water in the east is not as clear or clean as it is off Gothenburg, but that the divers have such faith in their equipment that they are confident of success. He watches as one diver is readied for a descent, being helped into his diving gear as he sits on a stool. The outfit includes leather boots and a leather suit, both in double thickness. The tunic is sealed by iron rings and straps. A cap of ordinary cloth is placed on his head and he is ready to go down. The diver rises and in his awkward leather suit stumps a few paces to the side of the boat and contemplates the bell. It is, Negri notes, an anonymous and almost insignificant-looking creation. He estimates its height to be about one and a quarter metres. Its shape resembles that of a large church bell. Two men are needed to operate the block and tackle that is used to raise it from the platform.

As the bell slowly sways up into the air, Negri now sees the circular platform suspended on ropes half a metre below the skirt of the bell. He watches the diver’s slow step up onto this, watches him stoop to receive the tools being handed to him by his assistants – tools that he will need to carry out his work 30 metres (98 feet) below the surface of the water. The most important of these, Negri is told, is the stout wooden pole, 2 metres long and tipped with an iron hook. The focus of the search is the ship’s valuable cannons. Once the diver has located a gun, other specialist tools will be needed, including a large pair of tongs and a variety of grappling irons. For the actual raising of heavy items from the decks of the Vasa, a thick rope is used. The diver takes this inside the bell with him. One end of it is attached to the raft, and his task after submersion is to secure the other end to the object to be salvaged. When he is ready to go the driver gives a hand signal.

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A reconstruction of the working methods used by divers in the salvage of the Vasa ship. Wikimedia Commons.

Two men manning the block and tackle hoist the bell out over the surface of the water and Negri watches as it slowly disappears from sight. He describes the principle that now comes into operation. A pocket of air is trapped in the shoulder of the bell as it sinks under the waves, and for the next thirty minutes or so this is the diver’s only supply of oxygen as he carries out his work in his thick leather suit, prodding about in the darkness with his hooks and grapples.

After about twenty minutes, rather less than the advertised time, the submerged man gives a tug on the rope that runs from the bell to the raft and he is hoisted back to the surface. On this occasion the haul is a heavy oak plank with iron fittings. Afterward Negri talks to the diver and learns that the truncated session was due to the unusual coldness of the water. It is, after all, late October. As he talks to the diver he notices that the man is shivering, despite his thick leather clothing. Then, like some twenty-first-century television traveller, Negri asks if he might be allowed to take a dive in the bell himself. The Swedes are impressed by his spirit as much as by this evidence of real interest in the work, but his request is rejected: the water is much too cold. Negri did not stay there long enough to see any cannons being raised, but he was told that the guns on the second and third decks had to be eased out through the gun-ports using a special technique, which its inventors declined to describe to him in any detail, fearing that it might become common knowledge and so harm their prospects of further salvage commissions. However it was done, it was notably successful: between them, von Treileben and Peckell’s divers managed to salvage well over fifty guns from the wreck of the Vasa. Documents show that fifty-three of them were shipped to Lübeck in 1665.

And that, apart from the raising of one last cannon in 1683 in which no one appears to have shown any particular interest, was that. Soon, the Vasa and its strange fate and even its location had been all but forgotten. Matters remained so for the next 330 years, until 1956, when an amateur marine archaeologist named Anders Frantzen, who had developed an obsession with the sunken ship, finally managed, after several seasons of searching, to locate the wreck; and the long, slow process of raising and restoring the Vasa began.

The museum itself opened in 1990. Because it is situated just a short bus ride from the bus station in central Stockholm, where, when travelling to Gotland, I always had a wait of several hours for the connection to Nynæshamn and the ferry, I must have visited the Vasa museum five or six times – more often than either of my other two tourist options, the Strindberg Museum on Drottninggatan and the plaque at the junction of Sveavägen and Olof Palmes gata, marking the spot where Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was shot and killed on 28 February 1986. Usually when I travelled to Gotland it was in connection with the book I was working on about the Vikings, and one day as I left the museum and was making my way to the stop to catch the bus back into the centre the thought struck me that Rudbeck’s theories of Sweden’s Atlantean past, Gustavus Adolphus’s great Vasa ship and the adventures of the Swedish Rus, those Vikings who travelled east across the Baltic and made their greatest mark on history over there, all had something in common as symbols of Sweden’s brief century as an imperial great power. All three were:

1. Magnificent.

2. Ephemeral.

3. Impossible.

Magnificent, because all empires are in some way magnificent. Ephemeral and ultimately impossible, because Swedes in the seventeenth century, like the Rus in the ninth and tenth centuries, simply did not have the human resources to sustain the empires gained by their military prowess.

* Just occasionally, such an intemperate longing to live forever produces unlooked-for benefits, as when an attempt by a Hamburg alchemist named Brand to make gold out of dried urine led, quite by chance, to the discovery of phosphorus.