Shipwrecked

By Michael Tarm

Vello Mäss leans across a wood-spoked shipswheel and eagerly scans the Baltic Sea horizon as far as the eye can see—where, he says, tens of thousands of historically important ships, from the Danish coast to Russia, lie below the cold-gray waves waiting to be found.

“There are hundreds of Viking ships out there, hundreds of old trading ships, hundreds of warships,” mused the captain cum researcher, dubbed The Baltic Sea Sherlock Holmes in his native Estonia for finding so many such ships himself. “The Baltic’s an archaeological paradise.” Standing on the bridge of his tiny research boat docked in Tallinn for the winter, the burly, blue-eyed 63-year-old speaks excitedly about the next mystery he hopes to solve this summer: The whereabouts of the passenger ship Vironia, torpedoed near Estonia by Nazi planes during World War II.

War and stormy weather have been claiming Baltic seafarers for over 5,000 years, since the waterway became Northern Europe’s most prized and heavily plied trading route. Its best known recent victim was the Estonia ferry, which perished in 1994 when towering waves ripped off its bow door; 852 people died.

Clashes between Sweden and Russia cost hundreds of ships and thousands of lives; on just one day, July 3, 1790, Sweden alone lost 30 ships in the Battle of Vyborg against Russian forces. Sea mines laid during both World War I and II claimed thousands.

Up to 100,000 shipwrecks lie today on the Baltic Sea floor, said Stefan Wessman, a marine archeologist at Finland’s Maritime Museum. Researchers in the region widely agree on that figure.

“The Baltic Sea has huge potential—and I believe this is recognized by scientists internationally,” he said. “There is nothing comparable to it in the world.”

It’s not just the sheer number of ship wrecks in the Baltic that so enthralls underwater archeologists like Wessman and Mäss. It’s that so many are remarkably well-preserved—veritable time capsules certain to expand mankind’s understanding of the past.

“It’s hard to imagine something telling us more,” explained Wessman. “You can get a whole cross-section of a society on one ship. The only equivalent on land I can think of is if you found a whole ancient library buried intact. Ships are also the biggest and most technologically advanced objects of the different ages—not unlike rockets today—so they tell us more about the day’s science than even a cathedral might.”

Sweden’s royal warship Vasa, the most celebrated Baltic Sea discovery, was so well preserved after being raised 350 years after it sank in 1628—that minute details were clearly visible, down to smirks on dozens of cherubs and the flashing teeth on carved lions decorating its elaborate exterior.

Cutlery, shoes, muskets, gameboards and hundreds of other items were also found on the Vasa, one of the most advanced, decorative warships of its age. (While high-tech for the time, it foundered and sank on its maiden voyage because of apparent miscalculations about the required ballast to keep it stable.)

Archeologists can thank wood-eating shipworms—or, rather, the lack thereof.

The teredo navalis—actually a mollusc, not a worm—thrives in high-salt Atlantic and Pacific and can devour whole ships in decades. But this bane to underwater archeology avoids low-salt seas like the Baltic, the largest so called brackish sea in the world.

“If the Vasa had sunk in almost any other sea, you might find parts of it that were buried under the seabed—but any wood exposed to the sea would be gone,” said Wessman. “All that would be left would be a small pile of things that weren’t wood.”

“Only the American Great Lakes are roughly similar to the Baltic Sea in this respect,” he added. “But they don’t have the same long history of the Baltic Sea, which has seen virtually every type of ship sail across it.”

The Baltic’s cold temperatures and a low-oxygen content also act as preservatives.

Sweden’s Jonkoeping schooner, sunk by a German submarine in 1916 and salvaged near Finland in 1998, held nearly 5,000 bottles of top-quality French Gout Americain champagne, perfectly preserved in the constant 4 C temperatures. Several bottles were later auctioned at London’s Christie’s for 4,000 dollars each.

The Baltic’s also a mere 55-meters deep on average, compared to 3,700-meters in the Atlantic, so, once they’re found, wrecks are well within reach of even low-tech divers. Deep-sea dives in the major oceans require top-notch, and top-priced gear.

New three-dimensional sonar has also improved chances of finding wrecks—even by accident.

A Swedish submarine crew doing routine scanning last year was shocked to stumble upon an 18th century ship intact and upright—as if set lovingly on the seabed, a carved sea horse presiding majestically at its stern. Human skulls on deck were the only obvious signs of mishap.

But the key factor in opening up new opportunities for archeology in the region, at least for Mäss, has been a political sea change: namely, the demise of the Iron Curtain.

When it still draped across the Baltic Sea, communist Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, Poland and East Germany strictly forbid most underwater exploration.

“Getting permission for dives was very, very difficult,” recalled Mäss, born the year the Red Army occupied the three Baltic states in 1940. “The Soviets were paranoid about everything—that we might see underwater military equipment, that we might escape to the West.”

As a young sailor in the 1960s, he had to wait for 15 years before he was finally allowed to travel to and disembark in a foreign port.

“Soviet officials didn’t trust people from the Baltic states,” he said.

With no Soviet-era courses, Mäss taught himself the art of underwater archeology—deriving inspiration from films of history’s most famed diving innovator, Jacques Cousteau. A decade after Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania regained independence during the 1991 Soviet collapse, he’s now one of just a few regional experts in the field, a one-man force in Baltic shipwreck hunting.

Freedom not only opened up access to the Baltic Sea, it has allowed for a vital exchange of information and know-how across it. Sweden, for instance, donated one of those modern, three-dimensional sonars for use on Mäss’ ship—a converted fishing trawler called the Mare.

Speaking back at his office in Tallinn’s Maritime Museum, he keeps excusing himself to answer the phone—as his Nordic counterparts called to ask about his latest discoveries.

“There’s a hundred years’ worth of work out there,” he said, sweeping his hand at stacks of papers on his desk. “Life’s short. I’ve got to give it 100 percent.” He estimated that 10,000 ships lie off Estonia’s coast waiting for him and others to find.

While their coastlines have proven slightly less treacherous than Estonia’s, the seas around Latvia and Lithuania have also claimed their share of ships, including at the mouths of major rivers favored by fearsome Viking dragon boats. Both countries have also carried out more underwater surveys over the past ten years then they had in the previous 50.

Mäss’ most recent find, in July, was of Russia’s first armored navy ship, the Russalka, or Mermaid in Russian. Underwater photos of the ship, which sank in a storm en route from Estonia to Finland in 1893, showed it stuck vertically in the soft sea floor like an enormous sword.

The discovery was widely hailed in Estonia, where a 1902 monument to the Russalka, a bronze angel tilting a crucifix toward the ship’s watery grave, is a popular tourist attraction in Tallinn. Many newlyweds leave bouquets at its granite base to honor the 177 sailors who died.

“One of my first concerns when we found the Russalka was whether the cross actually pointed the right way, towards where the ship sank,” Mäss said. “I was so relieved to find out it does.”

Hungry for still more discoveries, Mäss has thumbed through old newspaper clippings and even quizzed fishermen to glean clues about the sleek-white Vironia (photo), attacked by German planes as it ferried Soviet officials fleeing the 1941 wartime invasion of Estonia by the Nazis. Its route was laden with mines.

“Steam rushed out of the boilers with an infernal noise, drowning all other sounds,” recalled one witness, Russian naval commander Pjotr Makejev aboard a nearby vessel, in his memoirs. “People jumped overboard. Soon another mine exploded and the Vironia went down.”

The Vironia was in a 90-ship convoy carrying Soviet officers, Communists and their families in a frantic, last-minute escape from Tallinn. But within hours, 30 ships were sunk and 15,000 people died—one of the largest death tolls in a single engagement in history.

Many of the ships in that convoy belonged to pre-war Baltic owners but were commandeered by the Soviets after they annexed the countries. The Estonian-flagged Vironia, Latvia’s MS Everita and Lithuania’s Silguda—both of which also sank—were among them.

In 1941 alone, 400 mostly Soviet ships went down in battles on the Baltic.

Similar carnage continued throughout the war, including when several refugee ships escaping resurgent Red Army forces in 1944 were torpedoed by Soviet planes and sunk. One that was carrying several thousand Estonian escapees went down near Latvia.

Fishermen told Mäss how their nets kept becoming snagged near where the Vironia was believed to have perished—crucial information that will help narrow down its precise location. Mäss used similar leads to find a British naval minesweeper sunk in 1919 as it aided Estonia’s battle for independence against Russia.

A prime source for data on older wrecks are Danish customs records from 1490-1856, during which the Danes forced all ships entering the Baltic Sea to pay a toll. The papers, now kept in Denmark’s National Archives, include details on destinations and ports of departure.

Among ships identified using the Danish records was Holland’s Vrouw Maria, which sank off Finland en route to St. Petersburg in 1771. It was listed as carrying artwork for Russian Empress Catherine the Great. It was found in 1999, but hasn’t yet been salvaged.

Salvage laws differ in countries around the Baltic Sea, but there are laws in all meant to protect shipwrecks and their contents. All finds over 100-years-old in Finnish waters have been designated state property, according to Wessman.

Sites of other more recent disasters, like the Estonia ferry, are considered grave sanctuaries and, by law and under threat of arrest, are strictly off limits to divers and salvagers.

Mäss said finding something comparable to Sweden’s Vasa, the dramatic centerpiece of a popular museum in Stockholm, is the fantasy of most divers. His is to find an Estonian-built ship from the Viking era, when Estonians themselves staged raids across the Baltic Sea.

Money shortages mean researchers in all three Baltics are still mostly limited to briefly mapping and filming their discoveries. Some safes aboard World War II ships, like the Vironia, could contain historically important, perfectly preserved papers. But Mäss said Estonians don’t currently have resources to find them and bring them up.

“We’ll have to leave that to future generations,” he said.

It’s not only ships in the Baltic that are stirring excitement.

Hundreds of Stone Age settlements, overtaken by rising seas, have also been found—especially in Danish waters. And there are hundreds of planes that were shot down or crashed—some under mysterious circumstances during the Cold War.

And then there’s all that talk of treasure.

Titillating stories about caches of gold aboard long-lost shipwrecks abound in fishing villages up and down the 10 Baltic Sea coast countries—none of which, adds the kindly but matter-of-fact Mäss, he believes for a second.

In contrast to often gold-laden Spanish ships that plied the route back and forth from the New World, Baltic ships of that age typically hauled far less glamorous cargo—the likes of bricks, salt, furs, grain and herring, explained Mäss.

When he says so, he doesn’t show the slightest trace of disappointment that among the rewards he insists he reaps from his work—instant wealth will almost certainly never be among them.

“I’ve got history on my mind,” he said with a short laugh, “not gold.”

Source: City Paper, The Baltic States