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400-year-old warships in Swedish channel may be sisters of doomed Vasa

Two 17th-century shipwrecks on the bottom of a busy Swedish shipping channel may be the sister ships of the ill-fated Vasa. Archaeologists with Sweden's Vrak—Museum of Wrecks discovered the vessels in a 35-meter-deep channel near Stockholm during a recent survey. Neither wreck is as well-preserved as Vasa (to be fair, there are probably ships actually sailing today that aren't as well-preserved as Vasa), but they're in remarkably good shape for several centuries on the bottom.

Studying the wrecks could reveal more details about how early naval engineers revised their designs to avoid another disaster like Vasa.

The wrecks may be the remains of two of the four large warships Sweden's King Gustav II Adolf built in the 1620s and 1630s. The earliest of the four ships, Vasa, had a first trip out of port in 1628 that ended in disaster; the top-heavy vessel caught a gust of wind and leaned over far enough to let water rush in through open gun ports. King Gustav's prized warship sank just a few dozen meters offshore in front of hundreds of spectators, killing half the crew onboard.

On the other hand, the three later ships—Äpplet, Kronan, and Scepter—had longer careers. Äpplet sailed with the Swedish fleet to invade Germany in 1630, and Kronan and Scepter sailed against a combined Danish-Norwegian fleet in the 1644 battle of Kolberger Heide.

[...] At the moment, Hansson and his colleagues don't know which two of the three ships they're dealing with—assuming that the wrecks really are Vasa's sisters. The divers collected wood samples from both wrecks and will radiocarbon date them to confirm when the ships were built. All three of Vasa's sisters hail from the early 1630s, so if the dates match up, that will be a strong hint.

Meanwhile, the archaeologists plan to continue diving on the wrecks, measuring timbers and documenting details of how the ships are put together. Wooden sailing ships were the high-tech military vehicles of their day, and Vasa and her sisters were among the earliest to carry large numbers of heavy cannon. "We didn't have time to do a proper survey but will come back," Hansson told Ars. "It's quite hard to get a grip of such a big wreck in such a short time."

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