[ROCK MUSIC]
Named after the royal family, the Vasa
was built in 1626 at a time when Sweden
was becoming a military force.
The Swedish King, Gustaf Adolph, had
ambitious plans for his nation.
Gustaf wanted to create a new type of navy.
Instead of using ships simply to carry soldiers,
he wanted them to be heavily armed gun platforms.
In the winter of 1626, the Vasa took shape in the royal
dockyard in Stockholm.
King Gustaf had already reformed his army,
making sure his soldiers all had the same type of musket.
He wanted every ship in his navy to have the same type
of powerful bronze cannon.
The Vasa's 64 guns could fire over
500 pounds of shot in a single broadside,
traveling almost at the speed of sound.
That many 24-pounder guns needed an extra deck,
so the shipwrights made the ship taller.
That created a problem.
It's going to be higher out of the water,
more windage, more weight high up, but nothing extra
below the waterline, no extra ballast, no extra stability.
This ship is going to be dangerously top heavy.
Anybody who knew anything about ships
would have known that this was not a good idea.
But the king is absolute, and the kings will prevails.
NARRATOR: On the Sunday afternoon
of the 10th of August, 1628, Vasa
was finally ready to set sail.
The king was away at war in Prussia,
but thousands of his subjects turned out to watch.
The Vasas sailed about 1,000 yards,
and then the breeze picked up.
And when the first gust of wind filled the sails,
the ship began to heel to the port side, this side behind me.
And it hung there for a minute.
It didn't really come back up the way a ship should.
Knowledgeable people on board must have realized already
that there was something wrong.
Everybody else and guests probably just held their breath
for a minute or laughed it off.
NARRATOR: But things escalated quickly.
The wind filled the sails again,
and the ship heeled even more over to port.
In fact, it heeled so far to port
that the lower row of gunports went into the water.
NARRATOR: The sea began to pour in on one side of the deck,
pushing the port side down even further.
So even more water ran in, cascading down into the hull.
From that moment, the Vasa was lost.
The ship simply filled with water and sank like a stone.
It was probably gone within 10 minutes.
NARRATOR: For over 300 years, the mighty combat ship
lay at the bottom of Stockholm Harbor
until 1961, when Anders Franzen and his team
brought her to the surface.
He had great plans for the Vasa.
The brilliance of Franzen was he was a great salesman.
And he had a vision of what Vasa could become.
He saw that Vasa could become the centerpiece
of a world-class museum.
NARRATOR: The ship is now one of Sweden's
most popular tourist attractions,
a 400-year-old cautionary tale.
So we have the world's most unsuccessful 17th
century warship on display as an example
of what not to do in future.