Baltic Seabed May Hold Sweden’s Oldest Warship

The human skulls, huge timber spars and cannonballs littering the seabed could be the wreckage of Sweden’s oldest warship.

If confirmed as the Lybska Svan, it was aboard this vessel that Denmark signed a capitulation in 1523 that paved the way for Sweden to become an independent state and Stockholm its capital.

“Finding this was a fantastic feeling--a sense of living history. We were overjoyed,” said Jonny Sundquist, head of a diving company that came across the wreck last November.

A research team has obtained permission to seal off the site in Stockholm’s coastal archipelago, a holiday paradise of sheltered waters dotted with thousands of small, rocky islands.

The researchers will spend the summer months documenting and measuring each part of the wreckage--the timbers, primitive cannons, ammunition, human bones, cooking pots and shoes--in an effort to pin down its identity.

Unlike the 17th-Century Vasa, which sank on its maiden voyage and has been restored, drawing thousands of visitors to a Stockholm museum, the Lybska Svan had fought in nine engagements before it sank in 1525.

“As the British say, she had seen some action,” said Anders Franzen, the marine archeologist who discovered the Vasa and helped locate the Svan. “If this really is the Lybska Svan, then we can give away the Vasa,” he joked.

Records differ as to whether the Lybska Svan, flagship of a 12-vessel flotilla purchased by Sweden in 1522 from the Hanseatic merchants of Lubeck in Germany, sank near Stockholm or off the island of Oland.

The main problem in identifying the wreck is that ships at that time did not have fixed names, let alone nameplates.