In 1625, Sweden’s King Gustav II Adolf ordered four ships—large regal ships—to crown the fleet. The four ships were Vasa, Äpplet, Scepter and Svärdet. Mimo Moqvist relays the story of one of them: Äpplet (The Apple).
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Gustav II Adolf had been king for 14 years by then, had already won two wars and was well on the way to transforming the Swedish army into the most well-trained and feared in Europe. He decided to dominate the Baltic Sea by building a strong navy so that Sweden could control the profitable trade. In the wake of this, large, powerful warships were needed to strike fear into the hearts of his opponents, and the king called Dutchman Henrik Hybertsson to Sweden to build them. At the time, Sweden was allied with the Netherlands, which had the best shipbuilders in Europe. Hybertsson immediately set to work, starting with the Vasa ship.
Henrik Hybertsson did not have an easy time as a shipbuilder; the king and the admirals had strong opinions about what they wanted a ship of this dignity to look like, while Hybertsson, who was a recognised skilled shipbuilder, had a more engineering-based and practical view of what was actually feasible. The king and the admirals wanted two gun decks, which meant the ship would be tall, slender and difficult to sail.
Unfortunately, Hybertsson died in the middle of the construction when Vasa was just over half-finished, so Hein Jakobsson took over and continued the building. Jakobsson later claimed, in the court records of the Vasa’s sinking, that he tried to widen the ship but probably did not get that change through. For a time, the Vasa and Äpplet lay next to each other when they were built. The idea was that they would eventually sail together as flagships in the fleet.
Big ships breaking new ground
Discussions surrounding the construction of Vasa and its spectacular design were running high. It was breaking new ground because ships this big had never been built before. However, the ship ended up being high and unstable because the king and the admirals wanted to include as many cannons as possible—not just many, but also large cannons.
As this had never been done before, no one knew exactly how it should be done in practice; the gun ports must not be too low, not too close to the water and not too high because then the ship would be too slender. Even here, Jakobsson doubted the stability of the ship, but a major remodelling would mean serious delays. Both Vasa and Äpplet were fitted with armaments, namely 24-pound guns on both decks. This made them two of the most heavily armoured ships in the world at the time.
Vasa’s heyday was short. Very short. Several critical factors, including being too high and too straight, carrying heavy armaments and an unfortunate gust of wind, caused it to heel to port so that water poured in through the open gun ports on the lower battery deck. The ship sank on the very day of its maiden voyage on 10 August 1628.
Jakobsson finished building Äpplet, but he made a few important changes, widening the ship by 1.2 metres and making the hull a slightly different shape to avoid a fate similar to that of Vasa’s. Äpplet was launched in the autumn of 1628 and commissioned in 1630.
As one of its first tasks, Äpplet participated in the large armada of around 100 ships assembled for Sweden’s entry into the Thirty Years’ War. In June 1630, the Swedish army was transported to Germany. Twelve thousand men, horses and supplies were shipped out with the big Äpplet in the lead. It had just over 1,000 men on board, 900 of whom were soldiers. The highest-ranking man on board was the king’s half-brother, Admiral Karl Karlsson Gyllenhielm.
A missing queen
In the summer of 1631, a similar voyage was made. On one of the ships was Queen Maria Eleonora, who was travelling to visit her husband. On the way down to Germany, the ships were separated by fog and storms. When Äpplet and most of the fleet reunited at Stralsund and unloaded the jacks, they discovered that the queen’s ship was missing. Facing his king with a lost queen seemed downright unwise, despite blood ties, so the admiral took Äpplet and some other ships out to search for the missing ship. The queen was eventually found, safe and sound, on the island of Öland, where she had sought refuge from the storm.
Long and faithful service
Äpplet did not, however, enjoy the grandiose career in various sea battles that it was intended for. The ship was difficult to sail, and in a letter from naval officer Klas Fleming to the king, Fleming complained that Äpplet and similar ships “mostly lie in the harbour and look pretty”—to show off how big and powerful they are. It is likely that Äpplet was often stationary, as the large ships were expensive to crew and maintain, had poorly skilled sailors and were more difficult to manoeuvre than the smaller ships. It is also worth noting that in the Thirty Years’ War, which Gustav II Adolf joined in 1630, almost no naval battles were fought, and the powerful Swedish fleet was more concerned with moving the army.
The king tried to sell Äpplet three times but did not succeed in getting rid of it. So Äpplet remained in the Swedish Navy and sailed for 30 years, remaining in service until 1658, when an inspection revealed that the ship was no longer in good condition and profitable to repair. However, Äpplet was given one last important task when it was sunk in 1659 in an inlet to Stockholm as part of a barrage to prevent the enemy from reaching Stockholm by sea, and there the story ends for one of Sweden’s greatest warships of all time.
A new era
In 2021, marine archaeologists from VRAK Museum of Wrecks in Stockholm discovered a large wreck in a strait off Vaxholm during work with the Swedish Armed Forces. Most of the hull is preserved up to the lower battery deck and sticks up several metres from the bottom. Dropped to the bottom next to the wreck, parts of the ship’s sides are relatively intact.
“Around Lucia 2021, when we made the first dive, just after a visit to Vasa—Well, the gut feeling said that this was something different from the smaller wrecks we found there. There was a large wreck, a giant ship, but it still had intact sides, some 6 to 7 metres up. Then we saw the sides next to it, also in large intact pieces, and realised that there were two rows of gun ports—so double gun decks—and we felt quite quickly that this... this was not an ordinary ship. It’s one of the coolest wrecks I’ve ever seen,” Jim Hansson, project manager at VRAK, said enthusiastically.
Researchers from VRAK are working on a major research project mapping wrecks in the Baltic Sea. The project is all about finding and telling the stories of the old ships and documenting the development of the art of shipbuilding. Researchers have been conducting dives in several places, and on this particular occasion, they were not specifically looking for Äpplet, but they were looking for one of Vasa’s sister ships.
“We were specifically looking for details that we had just seen on Vasa,” said Hansson. “We had gone through deck by deck on Vasa, taking photos and measurements, and now it was like a giant jigsaw puzzle we were trying to put together. When we found Äpplet, we immediately felt that we had to continue with this. So, we managed to do a whole week of dives in the spring of 2022; that’s when we measured it, took wood samples and did what we could to determine which ship it was.”
Collected measurements, technical details, wood samples and archive documents then confirmed that it was Äpplet—Vasa’s sister ship. Even the oak timbers for the ship’s construction were felled in the same place as Vasa’s, more specifically in the spring of 1627 in Mälardalen, at Ängsö Castle between Västerås and Enköping in Sweden.
16th century-style refurbishment
The work of sinking old warships and large stone barriers in the strait between Rindö and Värmdö in the Stockholm archipelago began as early as the mid-16th century. This was done to block the entrance to the capital and force enemy ships to head for Kodjupet instead, where Vaxholm Fortress was waiting with its cannons. According to historical sources, at least ten large ships were sunk here in the 17th century.
“The idea was to sink two smaller ships nailed together at the bottom and then Äpplet, the big ship, on top. There is a sketch of it from the 17th century,” said Hansson. “But they ran into problems because the smaller ships moved after a storm, so when Äpplet was lowered, it ended up too deep.”
Europe was in turmoil at the time, just as it is now, so they were trying to rearm and find ways to keep the country safe—blocking the entrance to prevent enemies was one of them. But during the actual construction of Äpplet, several changes were made, mainly after the sinking of the Vasa.
“An important part of finding Äpplet was to try to measure its width. That was one of the first things we did by checking the deck beams,” said Hansson. “We found a good technique to get the width, and once we had that, we could match it to the archives. We knew that Vasa was 11.30 metres wide, and we knew that Äpplet would be about 1.20 metres wider, so we had the facts to go on.”
The next step was to try to find additional ship engineering solutions and construction details to see if Jakobsson made any other solutions than just changing dimensions. This might give a clearer picture of how the development of building such large ships has progressed. But it was not easy work the researchers had ahead of them.
“This is one of the most difficult wreck sites I have worked on,” said Hansson. “It spreads out in all sorts of directions, and there are no bad dimensions, so it is difficult to get an overview of what you actually see. Add to that the fact that it’s in busy waters, cold, deep and dark—it makes the work extremely difficult. But the whole point of finding Äpplet is that now we can see and accurately compare it with Vasa, what they have changed, what we are most curious about and what is so damn cool.”
The end of big ships
The construction of such large ships in the first half of the 17th century was completely new but did not only occur in Sweden; even the Royal Navy in England struggled with the same problems as Hybertsson and Jakobsson. It was a rather experimental business, and after the Vasa fiasco and Äpplet's rather stagnant years of service, people did not build such large ships for almost 25 years and returned to smaller and more powerful ships.
“The Dutch navy was the leader during this time—it was their golden age—and they had no large ships. Only the English made similar attempts to build large warships, but even they didn’t know how to do it practically at the time. This was not unique to Vasa. They quickly changed the armament of Äpplet; the armaments were removed as early as 1631. It’s much the same principle as when you try to develop fighter planes—it takes a couple of crashes before it gets good. So, we think they made more changes while Äpplet was in service,” explained Hansson.
So, not only was the size abandoned, but the concept of armouring their warships also changed, with heavier guns on the lower battery deck and lighter guns on the upper deck once again becoming the norm. This made the centre of gravity lower, the ships steadier and thus easier to sail.
“We know that the Sword and Sceptre were both wider and had lower stern casings, which was probably another development after Äpplet. But Äpplet is the ship that, for a time, actually lay next to Vasa during the construction period, so it is a bit special.
“It is only now, with Äpplet, that we can really talk about exactly why Vasa was so bad—now that we can get answers to what changes were made to Äpplet. Perhaps it can enhance the historical value and silence those who moan about Vasa and that Sweden’s most visited museum (the Vasa Museum in Stockholm – ed.) is a tribute to the country’s biggest failure,” Hansson firmly concluded.
For more information, please visit: vrak.se/en
