Adventures of a Sea Hunter

by James P. Delgado

  Heading up the Baltic towards the Gulf of Finland, Vrouw Maria sailed into a storm on the September 30. For the next three days, the ship beat through heavy seas and rain. Lorentz did not realize that Vrouw Maria, drifting in the storm, was off course. Then, on the evening of October 3, the ship hit a submerged rock. The collision brought Vrouw Maria to a sudden stop, and Lorentz wrote in the ship’s log that “at first we thought that we would sink when a high wave lifted us.” As she drifted along, the ship hit another rock: “We struck hard and lost our rudder and part of the stern.” Leaking badly, Vrouw Maria drifted off again, and the crew anchored her. Every man took a turn at the pumps to try and get rid of the water that was rapidly filling the ship. They pumped all night, but by the early morning, the storm was still blowing and the crew was exhausted. “Since we could not continue pumping and save the ship and its cargo,” said Lorentz, he gave order to abandon ship.

  Crowded into a small dinghy, the crew rowed over to a small island, not much bigger than a rock, and spent a cold night. When help arrived the next morning, Lorentz and his men learned that they were stranded off the southern coast of Finland in the Turko Archipelago, a maze of twenty thousand islets, islands and rocks. The ship, surprisingly, was still afloat, though there was little chance of saving her as the decks were close to the water. But some of the cargo might be saved, so Lorentz ordered the crew back to Vrouw Maria. For the next three days, they worked the pumps to keep the rising water in the hold from swamping the ship. The sugar cargo was certainly ruined; when Lorentz tasted the water pouring out of the pumps as the men labored, it was sweet. His dismay deepened when each stroke of the pumps brought up gouts of coffee beans. The crates, bundles, bags and boxes in the flooded hold were banging and bumping around, and breaking up.

  Lorentz’s luck held long enough for the crew to open the hatches and start pulling out the top layer of cargo. Taking their knives in hand, the sailors also cut down Vrouw Maria’s sails and some of her rigging, salvaging everything they could before the ship slipped into the deep. Finally, on October 9, as they rowed to the ship after spending the night ashore, they found the sea was empty. In the night, alone in the darkness, Vrouw Maria had finally sunk. There was no trace of the ship, not a scrap of floating debris, to mark her passing.

  ST. PETERSBURG: OCTOBER 16, 1771

  Count Nikita Panin, Russia’s foreign minister, sat at his desk, signing a confidential letter to the Swedish government. His letter asked the Swedes, who controlled the Turko Archipelago, to assist the Russians in an “unusual” matter. Vrouw Maria’s secret shipment had included not only silver, snuffboxes and art for members of the Imperial Court but also, Panin explained, “several crates with valuable paintings belonging to Her Imperial Majesty the Empress.”

  Empress Catherine the Great was in the midst of assembling one of Europe’s greatest collections of art and treasure for her small Hermitage (or retreat) in the Winter Palace at St. Petersburg. She had married Peter, grandson of Peter the Great and heir to Russia’s throne, when she was sixteen. But Catherine soon grew disaffected with her husband, who was said to be weak-minded, indecisive and not conjugally interested in his passionate Prussian princess. After Peter was crowned tsar in 1761, his unpopularity grew. Catherine plotted with a group of nobles and army officers led by her lover, Count Grigory Orlov, to depose the tsar. When their coup toppled Peter from his throne in 1762, Catherine seized power. Her reign was a time of sweeping change in Russia. The empress, like her predecessor Peter the Great, was interested in modernizing and westernizing the nation, which was still a feudal state. Among her accomplishments was the introduction of smallpox vaccine to Russia in 1768. Under Catherine, the Russian court became a center for European culture. The empress invited prominent intellectuals to St. Petersburg, encouraged public building projects, and was a patron of the arts and literature both in Russia and abroad. An admirer of the French philosopher Voltaire, Catherine regularly corresponded with him. When Voltaire died in 1778, Catherine purchased his entire seven-thousand volume library and had it shipped to St. Petersburg.

  In her lifetime, Catherine the Great amassed collections so diverse and magnificent that she had to build an addition to her Winter Palace to house the paintings, sculptures, porcelain, antiquities, exquisite furnishings and silver. The secret cargo of Vrouw Maria had come from one of the most famous art collections of its day, making the loss all the more painful.

  When wealthy Dutch shipping merchant Gerrit Braamcamps died in Amsterdam on June 17, 1771, he left behind a home filled with that his contemporaries called a “treasure cabinet” of more than three hundred paintings, porcelain, silver and other valuables. But the heirs of Braamcamps wanted cash, not the collection, so they sold it at auction. Catherine ordered Russia’s ambassador to the Netherlands, Prince Galitsyn, to “look after her interests” at the sale. On her behalf, he acquired a number of European Old Masters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including paintings by Rembrandt and Rubens.

  Now, those paintings rested at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. “As these pictures are very sensitive to injury and need care,” Panin wrote, he was sending an officer, Major Thier, to co-ordinate a search with the Swedes. “I do not doubt that you will do your utmost as this matter concerns her Majesty the Empress personally,” Panin told the Swedish royal chancellor.

  Thier’s trip to Finland was in vain. Winter was fast approaching, and little could be done. The Swedes sent a number of expeditions out to the archipelago to search for the wreck. Boats towed grappling irons to try and snag the hulk, but the vast area and deep seas made it an impossible task. An obstruction at 30 fathoms was repeatedly snagged by searchers, but it proved to be a rock. The Swedes and Russians abandoned their efforts to find Vrouw Maria, and the ship, despite the rumors of riches aboard, was in time forgotten.

  VROUW MARIA AND A PRECIOUS CARGO

  We’re anchored above a small wooden shipwreck that Finnish researchers believe is Vrouw Maria. The story of the tiny Dutch ship with her secret cargo of precious paintings resurfaced in 1982, when Christian Ahlstro m, Finland’s leading shipwreck researcher and historian, discovered the tale while working through Swedish diplomatic records. Ahlstro m spent years meticulously reconstructing the tale of Vouw Maria, and his discoveries encouraged diver and researcher Rauno Koivusaari to start searching for the wreck in 1998. In June 1999, while towing a side-scan sonar behind his ship Teredo, Koivusaari finally located the intact wreck of a small wooden ship near Jurmo Island.

  Under Finnish law, all such finds are the property of the state. Koivusaari reported the discovery to the Maritime Museum of Finland, which acts on behalf of the National Board of Antiquities. The museum conducted a two-week survey of the exterior of the wreck in the summer of 2000. Lying in a deep hole surrounded by rocks, the wreck was missing its rudder and the deck hatches were open. Reaching inside the main cargo hatch, archeologists carefully recovered three clay tobacco pipes, a metal ingot and small round lead seal. A clay bottle lying on the deck was also mapped and recovered.

  Back in the laboratory of the maritime museum, analysis of the artifacts showed the researchers that they were on the right track. The pipes were Dutch, and one of them had a maker’s mark that indicated the pipe was made by Jan Souffreau of Gouda, Holland, whose factory was in business from 1732 to 1782. The ingot was zinc, and Vrouw Maria was known to have been carrying nearly forty “ship pounds” of that metal. The lead seal, probably from twine that wrapped a bale of cloth, was marked “Leyden,” from the Dutch town of the same name. The clay bottle, no older than the 1760s, held mineral water from the German town of Trier.

  But more work was needed. The museum assembled a team under the direction of senior curator and archeologist Saalamaria Tikkanen, who invited The Sea Hunters to participate in the first detailed look both inside and outside the wreck.

  We’re aboard the research vessel Teredo, heading for the site of the wreck of Vrouw Maria with an expert team of Finns who are volu
nteering their time, and archeologists Matias Laitenen and Minna Koivikko. I’m here with The Sea Hunters to join the expedition and to film the work of the Finnish team as part of our television series. We’re all excited by the uniqueness of the wreck of Vrouw Maria and her story, and by the fact that, despite its importance, the story is not well known outside Scandinavia. That’s about to change. Our producer and team leader, John Davis, helps Mike Fletcher suit up for his dive. Mike’s son Warren and my daughter Beth both haul gear and work to prepare for Mike’s 140-foot plunge into darkness. We rig Mike’s helmet, lights and underwater video camera.

  As we watch a small color monitor on Teredo’s bridge, it’s almost as though we’re there when Mike jumps off the ship and starts his fall into the depths. The water is clear, and soon the form of the wreck comes into view. The rounded hull sits nearly level on the bottom, with a slight list to starboard. The lower part of the masts rise halfway to the surface, and one anchor rests against the port side of the hull. The ship is surprisingly intact, thanks to the special conditions of the Baltic. Vrouw Maria is an example, like the famous Swedish warship Vasa, of how the Baltic’s waters preserve old shipwrecks. Vasa capsized and sank in Stockholm harbor in 1628. Swedish researchers discovered the intact hulk and raised it in 1961. Stained black with age, but looking just as she did when she sailed nearly four centuries ago, Vasa is one of the world’s great archeological treasures and one of Sweden’s major tourist attractions in its own museum on the Stockholm waterfront.

  The Baltic preserved Vasa and Vrouw Maria so well because it is a deep, cold sea with a low salinity level. In some areas, the Baltic is practically fresh water because of the many lakes and rivers that drain into it, and cold fresh water preserves wood better than salt water. But most important, the low salinity levels keep out the teredo navalis, a sea worm that eats wood and will consume a wooden wreck within a matter of decades. That’s why we’re all smiling at the wry Finnish humor evident in naming their research vessel Teredo. But unlike its namesake worm, this vessel’s mission is to document and preserve wrecks. The fact that when the Swedes raised Vasa, they found coils of rope, leather shoes and a crock of still-edible butter inside the ship, provides some hope about the state of Vrouw Maria’s precious cargo after more than a couple of centuries in the water.

  As Mike makes his way around the wreck, we are able to follow, step by step, the actions of Reynoud Lorentz and his nine-man crew as they struggled to save the cargo. It becomes increasingly clear, as we carefully survey the wreck, that this is Vrouw Maria. The stern is damaged—rudder missing and planks broken. It’s not enough damage to quickly fill the ship, but it is enough to slowly flood her. The ship appears to have sunk at anchor, and we know that Lorentz and his crew had anchored Vrouw Maria before the last time they left her. They believed that the thick anchor cables had parted and that the ship had drifted off and sunk, but we can see that the ship filled and sank by the bow, practically on top of an anchor.

  Air trapped inside the sinking ship’s stern damaged it when she sank. The quarterdeck was ripped free, leaving the captain’s cabin an empty shell. A hatch at the back of the stern burst open, and loose planks litter the seabed. Yet the sinking did little to disturb the decks, though some of the planks are missing, others loose, again perhaps part of the frantic work by the crew to pull cargo out of the flooded hold. Loose bits of rigging—blocks, tackle, a coil of rope and the ship’s sounding lead, used to determine the depth of water—lie against the starboard rail, perhaps where the crew stowed them as they worked to salvage the ship. Looking at the lead line, I think of the entries in the logbook for

  A drawing of Vrouw Maria sitting upright on the ocean floor off Finland. Piirtänyt Kalle Salonen, Nauvo Trunsjö

  October 3, 1771, when Lorentz wrote that after hitting the rock, they “sounded and could not find the bottom,” a scary proposition. But working the ship “with great difficulty,” they “sounded again to approximately 13 fathoms, dropped the anchor, which gave way for a long while, we let out the whole rope and it finally began to hold, we fastened the sails and all hands went to the pump.” The lead line on the deck is a reminder that time is standing still on the bottom of the Baltic.

  A tangle of spars and the topmast lie against the hull. The windlass at the bow is still rigged for handling the anchor, though the rope cable has rotted away. A wooden handspike is still in its socket in the windlass, which was used to winch up the anchors, as if a crew member working it had just walked away. The pumps, with their handles alongside them, are visible near the stern, next to the dislodged tiller (ships of this period did not always have a ship’s wheel) that was used to steer Vrouw Maria.

  This wrecked ship looks as if she could be pumped free of water and, with a few repairs, rerigged and fitted with sail, resume a voyage interrupted 230 years ago. Discovering that Vrouw Maria is so intact raises the big question as Mike approaches the open cargo hatch. What will we find? The camera on Mike’s helmet reveals a tightly packed hold with very little space between the top of the cargo and the deck. It looks like Lorentz and his crew did not get very far in unpacking Vrouw Maria. We can see hundreds of clay tobacco pipes and an open crate that displays piles of eyeglass lenses. We can also see other crates, tall and narrow, standing on end.

  Thanks to Christian Ahlstro m’s research, we know what Lorentz and his crew managed to pull out of the hold; some of it matches what had been declared to the Danish customs officials at Elsinore—and much of it does not. Among the diverse cargo that Vrouw Maria’s crew salvaged were rolls of cloth (both coarse and fine), lead chests of coffee, a chest of tea, a chest of bound books, a box of cheese, a box of snuff, a box of “mirrors with gold frames, one round box of cartouche-packed tobacco, one round box with a small musical mechanism, twelve small ivory eggs, one linen package containing six pairs of cotton stockings,” plus a large painting with a gilt frame and five smaller pictures. These items were listed in the archives because the Swedes ended up auctioning them under the provisions of admiralty law. The Russians were eager to retrieve what they could, particularly the Empress Catherine’s treasures, but the Swedish governor of Turko, Baron Christopher Rappe, reported that “unfortunately, Her Majesty’s paintings are not included.”

  As I look at the tin crates standing on their ends, trapped by other cargo, I know I’m not alone in hoping that they hold Catherine’s paintings. No one knows just how many paintings the Russian agents bought in Amsterdam and placed in Vrouw Maria for shipment to St. Petersburg. In 1961, Dutch researcher Clara Bille studied the fate of the Braamcamps collection in her doctoral dissertation, and working from that, Maritime

  A drawing of the bow of Vrouw Maria. Piirtänyt Kalle Salonen, Nauvo Trunsjö

  Museum of Finland curator Ismo Malinen has suggested that as many as thirty-five of the Braamcamps paintings ended up on the ill-fated ship.

  Vague descriptions exist for many of the paintings, outside of brief notations in the Braamcamps auction catalog printed in July 1771. There were two paintings by Coedyk, a tableau and a scene of a man and woman sitting at a table. There was a Rubens portrait of “one of the four evangelists,” and a “portrait of a man” by Rembrandt. There was a painting of a “lady at a table” by Gerard Douw, a pupil of Rembrandt’s, and a scene of a man driving a herd of bulls by another Dutch master, Paulus Potter. Van Balen and Bruegel’s The Virgin and Infant Jesus, and three other Bruegels of unidentified landscapes and people, were packed in with paintings by Joseph Laquy, Jan van den Helden, Adriaen van Ostade, Jan van Gooyen, Adriaen van de Velde, Philips Wouwerman, Guido Reni, Lo Spagnoletto and several other artists. One of the paintings was an appropriate subject to be in a shipwrecked and sunken art collection: Abraham Stork’s Ships at Sea.

  The narrow tin crates in the hold of Vrouw Maria may very well contain these paintings, but we will not know for sure until the archeologists methodically excavate the ship and every crate is raised to the surface, then carefully and scientifically opened in
the lab.

  Mike approaches the bow, and the bluff, almost apple-cheeked shape of the old ship comes into view. The open hawse pipes gape like empty eye sockets. Trailing off the bow is a fallen section of mast that has an end shaped like the side of a giant cello. The age of the ship is apparent, and for me, it is thrilling to see, close up and in detail, a type of ship that has not sailed the oceans for centuries and which most of us have only seen as an engraved drawing in an old book. Mike moves along the port side of the wreck, and there, cemented to the hull planks by rust, is one of Vrouw Maria’s iron anchors. From its position, it looks as if the anchor was lashed up against the hull, its hooks pointing skyward and not hanging down, as we might expect. The anchor may have been tied by rope that has disintegrated, because something had to hold it against the planks long enough for the rust to bind with the wood. But why it is where it is, and how it was set, are mysteries.

  As Mike continues back to the stern, we see that the lintel above the entrance to Lorentz’s cabin is beautifully carved with a scroll decoration. It is a lovely touch on a utilitarian, hardworking ship, and a reminder that people loved and cared for her. That hint of a long-ago emotion has survived the wreck and Vrouw Maria’s long slumber in the deep.

  The time has come for Mike to start ascending, but he pauses for a moment to gaze back at Vrouw Maria, lying silent in the cold greenish-blue gloom of a Baltic grave. Then he begins the long slow climb back up to the surface, pausing to decompress as we share notes and observations.

  We’ll repeat this process tomorrow and in the days that follow, and the Finnish team also will send down their divers, with cameras and measuring devices, to meticulously plot and document every loose plank, every artifact on the deck, every fallen spar, to create a detailed record of Vrouw Maria as she now is. This level of painstaking documentation is absolutely essential before anything is disturbed or removed, a scientific protocol that separates us from souvenir hunters. If the lead line was taken away or some of the crates yanked out, we’d lose important clues as to what had happened. We’d lose some of those evocative connections across time, like the single handspike in the windlass, indicating where a sailor stepped away from working the anchor lines to start pumping. It is one thing to read about events in an old logbook; it is another thing altogether to have the privilege to see the scene exactly as that writer left it.