Page 214 - The Secret Museum

At the Vasa Museum, it is the inside of the ship that is the great secret, the hidden

treasure.

I was allowed to climb aboard Vasa to see what lies beneath the deck. A flight of
steps leads down on to the ship from the sixth floor of the museum. Fred Hocker
tapped a code into an alarm system, swung open a gate at the top of the steps and we
walked down on to the main deck. At the foot of the stairs was a row of smooth-soled
bowling shoes – a pair for every curator, to keep their feet from marking the decks. I
put a pair of blue plastic covers over my shoes and we set off to explore the ship’s
seven storeys.

We began with the admiral’s view, high up on the sterncastle, looking down on to

the deck. The deck was curved upwards, and I felt all at sea looking down over the
deck and beyond to where people wandered around the museum floor gazing up at the
sides of the ship. The admiral of Vasa nearly died, below deck, as the ship sank. If he
had ever known what would happen to his ship, that one day, others would stand in
his place, inside a museum, it would have surprised him, I’m sure.

Next, it was down some steps to the upper gundeck. From the museum floor, it
looks as if there were lots of windows in the ship but, when the ship sailed, out of
each one poked a cannon. The 64 cannons – on this deck and on the one below –

divided the spaces into rooms, each one for eight people. They had no hammocks, so
everyone ate and slept directly on the gundeck.

We walked to the forward end of the gundeck and looked out over the beak-head
of the boat. I saw two square boxes that once had lids on – the ship’s bathroom. I
poked my head through a window and saw to my right, carved into the ship, a
caricature of a Polish nobleman with the tail of a fish under a table, being squashed
by the cathead (a crane for lifting the anchors). This was a joke, for the enjoyment of
the 450 crew on-board heading into battle with Poland. A punishment in Poland for

behaving badly was being made to sit under a table and bark like a dog. When Vasa
was designed this little feature was added in so that the Swedish sailors would see
the humiliated face of their enemy when they were sitting on the loo. The carving was
propaganda for the crew, invisible from the outside of the ship.

We headed towards the stern. I felt quite disorientated as the floor swoops down
in the centre, and up at the bow and stern. There is more headroom than on similar
warships, such as HMS Victory – that was one of the reasons why Vasa sank: it sat
too high above the water – but the ceilings still aren’t that high: as we were walking,

I bashed my head on a light. Luckily, it wasn’t a bolt. Most of the curators have scars
on their heads as painful souvenirs from walking into these bolts in the ceiling.

As I bent over holding my head, Fred told me, ‘Vasa used to be a hard hat zone.
But when we showed Queen Elizabeth around the ship, she refused to wear a hard
hat.’ After that, none of the curators wanted to wear one either, and so the hats were
scrapped. Prince Charles and Camilla came aboard in the spring of 2012, and Prince
Charles asked why hard hats were not worn. ‘Sounds like my mother,’ he said, on