Vasa: The Warship That Sank Before It Left the Harbor

On Sunday, 10 August 1628, Sweden's new warship Vasa set sail in Stockholm in front of thousands of people. It sailed about 1,300 meters, leaned over in a gust of wind and sank. A few weeks earlier, thirty sailors had run across its deck in a stability test, and the ship rolled so far that the test was stopped. Nobody told the king. This is the story of the Vasa: the king who ordered it, the test that went wrong, the inquiry that punished no one, the divers who pulled up its cannons with a diving bell in the 1660s, the engineer who found it again in 1956, and the ship that still stands in Stockholm today, about 98 percent original. So... what happened? Subscribe:    / @sowhathappenedtv   Instagram:   / so.what.happenedtv   TikTok:   / so.what.happenedtv   Chapters 0:00 A ship in a museum 0:31 The king's ship 2:03 Thirty men running 3:06 Thirteen hundred meters 4:23 Who sank the Vasa? 5:11 Cannons in the dark 6:00 A piece of black oak 7:08 How do we know? 8:43 The people on board 9:22 Saving the ship twice 10:23 A gust of wind The ship drawings, maps and diagrams are simplified visualizations made for this video. The harbor map is not to scale. SOURCES • Vasa Museum, The disaster: https://www.vasamuseet.se/en/vasa-his... • Vasa Museum, Salvage: https://www.vasamuseet.se/en/vasa-his... • Vasa Museum, Timeline: https://www.vasamuseet.se/en/vasa-his... • Vasa Museum, Conservation: https://www.vasamuseet.se/en/research... • Vasa Museum, New support for Vasa: https://www.vasamuseet.se/en/about-th... • Swedish National Maritime and Transport Museums, Vasa: https://vrak.se/en/wrecks-and-remains... • Hocker, F. (2011). Vasa: A Swedish Warship. Medströms Bokförlag • Cederlund, C. O. & Hocker, F. (ed.) (2006). Vasa I: The Archaeology of a Swedish Warship of 1628. Statens maritima museer • GBH News (2016), New clues emerge in centuries-old Swedish shipwreck: https://www.wgbh.org/news/2016-10-11/... • Smithsonian Magazine (2023), the face of a woman who died on the Vasa: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-... • Fairley, R. E. & Willshire, M. J. (2003). Why the Vasa sank: 10 problems and some antidotes for software projects. IEEE Software 20(2) PHOTOS (Wikimedia Commons) • Jorge Láscar, CC BY 2.0: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index... , https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index... , https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index... • Daniel from Glasgow, CC BY 2.0: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index... , https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index... • Leszek Szleg, CC BY 3.0: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index... • Richardmaackphotography, CC BY 4.0: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index... • Anneli Karlsson / Vasamuseet, CC BY 4.0: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index... • Andy Eick, CC BY 2.0: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index... • Public domain (CC0): Yiannis Theologos Michellis; AleWi; Vasamuseet (King Gustaf VI Adolf, 1961); Nationaal Archief, Netherlands (the raising, 1961) Licenses: creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ , creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ , creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Thumbnail: photo by Jorge Láscar (CC BY 2.0), rotated and cropped, with text and water added. Map of the Baltic: Natural Earth (public domain). MUSIC "Stormfront", "Lord of the Land", "Spy Glass", "Prelude and Action", "Hitman", "Phantasm", "Deep Haze", "Clear Waters", "Wounded", "Long Road Ahead B", "Peaceful Desolation" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b... Voice: synthetic narration (Kokoro TTS). #history #shipwreck #sweden