The Vasa

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Hello, and welcome to Citation Needed, the podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia, and pretend we're experts because this is the internet, and that's how it works now.

I'm Noah and I'd like to remind everybody that I did an essay about my vacation first.

Doesn't really matter who wrote what when.

My episode came out first, so Cecil is copying off of me.

Also, Heath, Eli, and Tom are here.

Hey, Cecil, when did you finish your first essay and post it, though?

Like, when?

I fucking posted it in fucking month ago.

I'm called a Pokemon.

All right, in fairness, I submitted an essay about how I use my time off of work, and then you guys all cried and said, I think this was a quote.

We can't make this funny.

No one can make this funny.

Why did you make me read that?

Yeah, no, that's fair.

That's fair.

We were going to do the fatty art buckle.

Yeah, we were like, let's do fatty arbuckle instead.

No, okay, so right in the midst of me,

then Cecil telling you how awesome our vacations were, it's kind of awkward for me to hit yep for money at this point in the show, as we so often do.

So I'm going to wait until the end of the show.

And with that out of the way, tell tell us, Eli, what person, place, think, concept, phenomenon, or event will we be talking about today?

We'll be talking about the Vasa.

All right, Cecil, you read the article and actually went to the thing and touched it.

Are you ready to show us your slides?

If you guys could dim the lights, here's my plain seat seat belt buckle.

I just want you to.

I thought it was upside down, but it wasn't.

Oh, okay.

So next slide.

So tell us, Cecil.

Wait, maybe the slide's upside down.

Maybe it was upside down.

Yeah.

So tell us, Cecil, how are you going to make your vacation tax deductible?

I didn't think of that.

I'm totally going to do that now.

100%.

Okay, so I recently visited Sweden for the first time and I went to the most amazing museum while I was there.

The subject of the museum is essentially one gigantic recovered object.

It's a 64-cannon double gun deck warship that sank in 1628.

In 1961, the ship was raised, largely intact, from the water and placed in a shipyard where it was maintained.

And then they eventually built this climate-controlled museum to house and preserve it.

My inner history nerd was absolutely blown away by the exhibit.

And then, when I took a guided tour of the boat, I learned that it would also make a perfect citation-needed story.

Is it because they overloaded the cargo bay with competence, Cecil?

Is that why?

Yeah, no, I feel like may you one day live through a citation-needed episode is a pretty solid curse.

Oh, yeah, for sure.

Pretty much.

In order to get to the ship itself, we have to go back to the time and the place to get a little background.

Sweden at that point was a lot bigger than it is right now.

It's chilly, Cecil.

It's cold.

It had parts of other current Baltic countries as its territory and was considered one of the major powers in the region.

Sweden had a navy, but it lost some battles and some ships in the years leading up to 1628.

So they were down some ships.

The Swedes also never stopped getting into battles and wars that required a navy.

And they had a lot of economic interests that required them to get involved in conflicts that occurred in neighboring states.

I'm so excited.

I went to this place a couple of years ago, too, with Anne and Anna and Kara, and we got followed around by a random Swedish guy the whole time.

This guy had even stronger powers of the Neurospice than me.

And he just shouted trivia about the boat the whole time, following us around.

It was like, it was like citation needed attacking us with an episode.

And even then, I kind of enjoyed it.

But the whole time, I was like, this would be great if Cecil was explaining it instead.

So up until this point, Swedish Navy was mostly small or medium-sized ships with only one gun deck.

This is one of the most important data points in this story, so pin in it.

They would have smaller guns, what they called 12-pounders.

This means that they were loaded with a 12-pound payload.

These ships were a lot cheaper than bigger ships that existed at the time, obviously, and they served a practical purpose for Sweden.

They excelled at what they used them for, which was mostly escort vessels and for patrolling their territorial waters.

They were also great for the tactics of the time, which did involve some cannon foreplay, but mostly wound up with a boarding action.

Cannon?

By the time my balls are fired, CSO, we are well past four points.

It just depends on where the boarding action occurs, Tom.

You know?

Well, yeah, I've watched a lot of videos.

The Swedes play it differently than you and I, man.

Different field.

The king, Gustavus Adolphus, is also described as a keen artillerist.

He had wondered if ships, instead of like ramming each other and having a big fist fight, could instead be used as gigantic floating gun platform forts.

His thought was if one gun deck was good, then two gun decks is certainly better, right?

And why stick 12 pounders up there?

We could just turn our cannons up to 11 as well.

Wait, wait, wait.

Are we turning it up to 11 or down to 11?

Get the fuck out.

So he authorized a series of ships to be built with two gun decks with larger guns.

Beginning with the subject of this week's episode, The Vasa.

Yeah, its full name is Vasalada.

Cannonsman.

I'm not sure what qualifies someone, Cecil, as a keen artillerist exactly, but add more and bigger guns to our boat is exactly the kind of tactical genius flex that has kept Sweden the world military powerhouse we know it has today.

I'm trying to imagine them in a battle that wouldn't require a navy, right?

Like, who the fuck would you fight?

The mole men or something?

Sorry.

Now, you have to understand at the time, people made pretty good ships if they were sort of based on the ships that were already in service, sort of a standard model.

The ships did what they wanted them to do,

but we really didn't have a perfect grasp on all the theories behind shipbuilding.

People were doing some improvements over time, but there wasn't a ton of research and development going on.

So incrementally.

Ships improved in some ways, but a lot of shipbuilding was like, hey, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Now, there's an order for a ship with a whole other gun deck on top of the current gun deck.

And since this is being built as a firing platform more than a traditional warfare ship, the guns themselves need to be high on the boat.

And there's also this great line from the wiki, too: quote, safety margins during the 17th century were also far below anything that would be acceptable today.

This made VASA a risky undertaking, end quote.

Yeah.

Here at VASA ships, we don't know the meaning of cant or the basic equations for density and buoyancy.

also we've loaded these five billionaires into our hull we're not sure why but we hear it would be ideal

now the vasa was not the largest ship that was ever built up to that point nor was it a ship with the most cannon but it was the largest collection of artillery in a ship on the baltic oh led the league in third quarter rushing touchdowns from inside the tag

really is one of those stats isn't it and the amount of firepower on the ship in comparison to the size was pretty extreme.

In 1797, the U.S.

Constitution, also known as Old Ironsides, would have about the same amount of firepower, but it would outweigh the VASA by 700 tons or about a million and a half pounds.

Another key difference between these two ships is that the Constitution and the ships of that era would maneuver to broadside the enemy and present the guns on the side of the boat to their target.

And the Vasa had gun parts everywhere, all along the curve of the hull, so it could could shoot in any direction.

Okay, that actually feels pretty smart.

Like, if I owned a gun, I'd want to be able to fire at a full 360 every time, right?

Attackers come from behind you all the time.

That's like their whole thing, right?

Yeah, you guys remember that Nerf gun whose entire purpose was for you to pretend to surrender, and then you could shoot someone from the bottom of the handle.

That felt like such an odd circumstance to arrange for children to roleplay, right?

To be like, This, what you should do is this.

Okay, so podcast listener, Eli included a link to that nerf commercial from 1995 in our notes.

And I'm looking back over it now.

The fact that we only have two mass shootings a day is a miracle in this fucking,

it's just Cthulhu chanting, shoot your friends, shoot your friends.

The friends like they turn into little targets, and it's like it doesn't matter.

You can shoot them all you want.

They're not human beings,

they're rats and cockroaches, they deserve it.

The graves are not yet full.

What

Power is truth.

Power is truth.

It's nerf or nothing was actually their slogan.

I'm not making that up as a good third beat.

So guns at the time cost a lot of money.

Warships were actually much cheaper than the guns that they carried.

And cannon would last over 100 years while ships would only last around 20.

Ships would be given guns by the armory of the country that owned them for the campaign.

So you would basically take your ship to the library and check out your guns.

This, of course, meant that the guns themselves weren't standardized and were not even like of the same time period.

You could have a brand new gun and then perhaps one that's like 70 years old right next to it.

The VASA, however, is going to buck the system a bit.

They cast 46 24-pound cannon for this ship, all standardized and brand new.

They were cast in a single series in Stockholm where they were set aside to be put on the two gun decks of the ship.

They initially thought that they put the, you know, perhaps the 12 pounders on the upper gun deck, and then they just decided to do 24 pounders on the upper and lower gun deck.

They said, decided to fucking 24 pound this fucker out.

After they raised the ship, they had to pay the late fees for all those guns.

See, 333 years.

It's 121,545 days.

We're going to forgive the leap days.

Say it's a diamond day.

Sir, that will be $55,500.

That's not as bad as I thought it was going to be.

So

there are going out there like, guys, as long as we fire all the guns at once, we'll balance, right?

We just have to fire all of them.

We use as big guns as we want.

It doesn't fucking matter.

They're just all in one big string, and they just pull the string and they all go off at the exact same time.

So they hired Master Heinrich Hibertusen.

I don't know if I'm saying that correctly, to construct the ship.

He was the shipwright at the Stockholm shipyard.

He started construction in early 1626.

He fell ill late that year and handed the job over to another shipwright and then died about a half year later.

They launched the partially constructed ship early in 1627, and they found out that there were some serious issues right away.

One thing that research discovered is that the two sides of the vessel are actually different sizes.

They'd used two teams of people to make the ship: one side for the port and one side for the starboard.

One side had been measured in Swedish feet and the other in Amsterdam feet.

So the Swedish foot is about 1.38 centimeters or a half inch longer.

And that means the sizes were off a half inch per foot.

Oh my God.

And that also means that the port side of the ship was heavier than the starboard side.

All right, guys.

Okay.

The boat only does little circles.

I get it, but it's cool.

It's cool.

We sail around doing donuts and firing in every direction.

We are going to win every fight.

Yeah, I was like, hey, look, we can shoot in every direction.

It doesn't fucking matter which way we're pointed, okay?

The decks of the ship itself were too tall.

People were shorter than an average man height back then was around 5'6 or 1.67 meters.

The decks didn't need to be that tall.

The taller they were, the higher the center of gravity on the second gun deck.

The gun decks were both too high out of the waterline in the first place and then higher up because the space between decks.

They also over-reinforced the second gun deck.

They added heavy wooden deck beams and they put them way too close together.

The over-support meant they didn't have to worry about structural issues, but it was unnecessary.

So it added weight to the ship and not in like a ballast kind of way, more in like a weebles wobble and then fucking sink like a stone kind of way.

The gun decks themselves were also not parallel to the waterline.

Instead, they followed the natural curve of the boat or what they called the shear line.

And that also made some of the guns on the boat unnecessarily high.

Yeah, so like imagine a sippy cup for little kids, but upside down.

and with guns pointing in every direction.

Good news is we're bristling with guns and there's plenty of headroom below decks.

Bad news is we're bobbing about in the water like a wacky waving inflatable armfully.

Okay, you guys joke, but this sounds awesome.

We're having some boring boat fight where we're bringing up the broadside to fire our boring normal-sized cannons and then a drunk Swedish porcupine made of guns comes bobbing into the center things like commickets

girl with the dragon tattoo like they're ready to

go

they did however know that there was something wrong with it even they couldn't pinpoint what it was they couldn't pinpoint what the dude it has two different sizes

on the two sides i don't know that they knew that um now how do you think they glued it when they got the two sides and they were like it's off by a bunch do we glue it like do we line up the back and how do they do that and not notice that they had done it I feel like the guy who was responsible is like Tom where he just fucking squeezes it and puts it together and then walks the other ways like nope it's fine everybody

it's fine

No amount of ballast in the bottom of the ship was going to fix the stability issues they were having.

When the ship was nearly completed in the summer of 1628, the captain that was supervising the construction decided to show the the vice admiral of the Swedish fleet what was happening with the ship.

So he arranged for 30 crewmen to run back and forth from port to starboard on the ship just to start it rocking.

He had planned to have them run back and forth 10 times.

The vice admiral called a halt to the test after the men ran back and forth three times because he was afraid it was going to tip over.

Oh my god.

The admiral.

Wait, wait, wait, do it for us.

Do it for us.

Even at that.

Fuck.

The admiral.

Stop, though.

The admiral was

sort of getting a constant stream of letters from the king asking where the fuck his new ship was and why it wasn't out in the sea, killing shit, had remarked that he wished the king was there and home to see this.

All right.

Well, while we find a way to break it to him that the king would have just said, well, then don't tell the sailors to run back and forth like that.

We're going to pause for a little apropos of nothing.

Uh, maybe by attaching it here at the mizzenmast?

Oh, no, look at the measurements.

That would create like a weak union there.

I don't know that's a good idea.

He's right, sir.

It would.

Damn.

Are you?

Oh, hello, Your Majesty.

Hello, Captain.

Well, look at this.

The whole team is here.

How is the construction on my fabulous warship coming?

Who has good news for me?

Right, right.

Well, it is

coming along, sir.

But we fear that your design may have a few flaws.

Aboo, no, I don't think that's it.

If you'll forgive me, Your Highness.

I won't, and I'll have you tortured.

I'm sorry, what?

I will not forgive you, and I'll have you tortured.

Oh, um,

I think what Roger means to say, uh, Your Highness, is that your brilliance is far above anything that naval science has ever achieved.

Oranges?

Boats, Your Highness.

Naval means boats.

Does it?

Because I feel like we could settle this with a little bit of torture.

Nope.

No need for that.

I misspoke.

The point is that our humble knowledge has not caught up

to your brilliance.

And we're just, we're...

merely trying to match your excellence.

There, finally, someone speaks it plain.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Well, I will leave you to it, but before I go, just really, really quick.

Yes, Your Majesty.

I would like the boat to fly.

Um,

you're gonna torture us if we say no?

Yes.

Yep, we're gonna make it fly.

Hooray, teamwork.

Yep, okay.

Okay, what about Tuesday?

Pizza.

Wednesday?

Leftover pizza.

Right, sure.

Hey, hey, guys, what you doing?

Oh, hey, Noah.

Now that Tom's kids are back in school, we're trying to come up with some simple meal planning, but it is not going super well.

Look, man, if you can come up with a food that can be cooked in under eight minutes and doesn't contain carbon, I don't know what to to tell you.

They don't eat carbon.

I know some do, some don't.

It's like, um,

I see.

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All right, guys, thanks.

I feel like carbon's in everything, though.

It's not an antimatter.

Got it.

Antimatter.

It's all she'll eat.

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And we're back.

When we last left off, Cecil was telling us what modern America would look like if it was a boat.

Cecil.

Okay, so we get to the day of its launch, and it's August 10th, and the Vasa is ready for its maiden voyage.

I don't know that it is, Susan.

Ready, ready.

Now, I couldn't find this anywhere in the book or in the wiki, but the tour guide at the museum said it, and it was like, bring your family to work day that day.

So basically, this guy yelled at us, too.

Same guy.

So basically, the entire crew.

brought their whole families to watch daddy sail this brand new warship through the Stockholm harbor and not from land.

They weren't on land, they were on the ship itself.

So remember that this ship has its crew on it that isn't the normal size since it's just going to putz around the harbor for a bit.

And it also has a bunch of people that aren't really part of the crew as well.

So this is where daddy shoots a 24-pound ball of iron at 1,500 feet per second into the broadsides of our enemies to send their daddies screaming, bloodied, and maimed to the bottom of the sea.

Is that Swedish feet or Dutch feet, though?

Fucking matters.

So the day itself is calm.

They head out from the shipyard and it's going great.

There's only a very light breeze from the southeast and the ship was hauled out before it unfurled its sails.

Now all the guns aren't actually on the ship, but there's a large complement of cannons because they want to ride around the harbor thumping these base cannons with just powder to show what kind of badass ship it was.

Glass-packed mufflers, we're rolling coal, cannon planks.

It's a big day.

This is going to be awesome.

The Vasa then passes out of an area where the land and the buildings were blocking the wind.

And it's got the sails out and it floats right out there in the open weather and it immediately tips fucking over.

Like super fast and it's on its side, right?

The crew, they acted quickly and the sheets were cast off, meaning they basically let the rope lines for the sails get slack.

The boat rights itself.

Okay, deep breath.

Was not expecting that.

Yes, we were.

But no matter, they're out there in this bay.

They're going to make the most of it.

So they soldiered on.

Okay.

So this is going to sound weird, but this is how this whole story relates to high school hockey.

So I was the first player in London to come out onto the ice for a hockey game one time in high school, and I forgot to take off the fabric soakers that you put on your skateblades.

Uh-oh.

And I ate it right away, obviously, because ice and fabric.

So I left the rink and I never came back.

But that's not the point.

If I did come back, I would have taken him off.

That's what I'm saying.

Yes.

That lesson was not learned here.

And by the way, just like Heath, there were probably plenty of sailors that had to try to like play it cool in front of their wives and shit.

Like this is just normal shit that happens on the boat.

There's whistling.

My wife made fun of me a lot after that hockey game, man, forever.

So.

It goes back behind more land for a bit and everything's cool.

And then 1,200 meters from where it was launched, that's three quarters of a mile by the way it's hit with a bigger gust of wind and it's on its port side again now remember when i said that all the gun decks were open because they wanted a party pop their way through the harbor that day well the open gun decks meant that water starts flowing in the lower decks were quickly flooded and the ship could not right itself as the water reached the hold the ship started to sink sank pretty quickly in a depth of 32 meters or about 100 feet the ship itself sank in the harbor so it was only like 400 feet from the shore, about 120 meters.

That's so rough.

And the masts, they didn't actually fully sink because they were taller than the water.

So

the people just didn't try to swim for sure.

They just clung onto the mast and waited for rescue.

I know you hear me.

Swedish Coast Guard boat trundles its way out.

One guy gets on, ship immediately spins upside down and explodes.

Sorry, the king designed these dudes.

You know, there was one guy.

Let me, let me turn us to the side slightly for a moment, if I may.

There was one guy who came out and his wife was like, you never meet me anywhere.

And he was like, fine, we'll go to the fucking boat thing.

They got there and she was like, that boat's not going to turn.

He was like, you don't know fucking shit about boats, Gretchen.

You don't know anything about boats.

You have a third grade education.

And it fell over and he was like fucking God can't I'm never gonna hear the end of this fucking shit.

I'm never I hope I'm one of the 30 that drowns is all I'm saying This is what you just every time I disagree from now well, it's like when remember when you said about one thing

There's a Gretchen who went to the really bad place on 9-11, right?

And like, that's gonna be a tough one.

Exactly.

There you go.

Exactly.

You're never going to hear the end of it.

You're never going to forget.

Rough.

Rough.

Yeah, because

it's one thing to just bomb on a joke, but it's another thing to bomb on a 9-11 joke.

I'm just letting you know.

I was staying with you.

I was holding you in the light.

I was holding you.

It's not a bomb.

It was a controlled demolition of my joke.

I'm never going to forget it, Heath.

I'll never forget it.

Thank you.

So the good news is.

Great jokes, Cecil.

Good news is.

Eli didn't show up for my joke today.

So the good news is there's this huge crowd of people and they're out there.

They came for the day to witness the strength of Sweden.

So out of the thousands of people that were there, some of the people got into boats and they rescued the people that are still in the water after it sank.

30 people still died, but they were able to rescue a bulk of the people out there.

Of the spectators that were there that day, a bunch of foreign ambassadors that Sweden was trying to impress with a show of power happened to be there.

Also, King Adolphus was a very special person.

Oh, Jesus.

That's what really matters.

Just imagine the Swedish ambassador that thinks the quickest, going,

and if we're willing to put our sailors in that motherfucker, just think about what we're willing to do to your sailors.

Now, we talked a lot about why the ship probably sank, mostly due to the weight of the guns and the placement so high and the center of gravity of the ship.

And thus, the ship was sort of unstable.

Researchers speculate that the crew that had run the ship

with the gun ports.

If they had run it with the gun ports closed, it's possible that it would have been able to right itself and not eventually sink.

Examining the gun ports on the boat, they found that the

ports themselves had like a double lip design, and that would have sealed well enough to prevent too much water from getting in the boat.

The captain did, in fact, order them closed when the ship tipped over a second time, but at that point, it was just too late.

Okay, just

hear what you just said, Cecil.

When it tipped the second time,

in calm seas, not in battle.

These dips just sank their own battleship with the game set on demo mode.

Yes.

Well, wait, and after, like, they're two tips in before somebody's like, hey, we should close the parts that are underwater.

Right.

Like, oh, keep those closed.

So somebody has to write a letter to the king, who at that point was in Poland.

He writes back.

Oh, not it.

He writes back and that there's, you know, there needs to be a full inquest and to finding out what the hell happened and to punish the people responsible, you know, just not me for designing the ship and rushing it to construction.

So they immediately set out to find a scapegoat to pin all the blame on.

They questioned everyone and predictably everyone involved tried to blame everyone else.

Quote, surviving crew members were questioned one by one about the handling of the ship at the time of the disaster.

Was she rigged properly for wind?

Was the crew sober?

Was the ballast ballast properly stowed?

Were the guns properly secured?

Did Barack Obama demand an intelligence report that was lying about the ship?

These are the questions.

However, considering the quote, however, no one was prepared to take the blame.

Crewmen and contractors formed two camps, each tried to blame the other, and everyone swore he had done his duty without fault.

End quote.

Okay, fine, fine.

Nobody's at fault.

Who hates getting tortured the least?

Everyone eventually figured out that if they blame Master Heinrich, who had was like super dead, then no one alive would get in trouble.

So that's what they did.

No one was found guilty of negligence or punished.

On further review, there's four minutes of missing footage of Heinrich's deathbed.

Very suspicious.

It's only a sliver of the deathbed, too.

You can't even see the whole deathbed.

They decided to raise the ship, but

they couldn't do it.

The principle of raising the ship is actually the system they used to eventually surface the ship, but they couldn't get it to work in the 17th century.

They had put two ships lashed together and they attached ropes under the hull of the Vasa to these vessels.

They'd fill these ships with as much water as they could without sinking them, and then they would tighten the ropes as tight as they could and then remove the water with a pump.

The buoyancy of the two ships would lift up the one ship, but it didn't.

It was stuck in the mud of the harbor and it wouldn't move.

The best best they could do was essentially right the ship so it was sitting in a sailing position.

This is actually one of the reasons why the ship was in such good condition today.

It was in the proper position so the stresses of gravity didn't break it.

Just kind of sitting there like the weird flower grave with the shiny pinwheel on the side of the highway for the person who died.

Why did we have those?

Well, yeah, who was consoled by the at least it isn't leaning over all willy-nilly down there, reassures?

Because that had to be like a whole thing to put it back up.

It just makes me feel bad.

And now it's like, oh, is that a ship?

Maybe they invented submarines super early.

You hated Grandma.

I did.

They were able to salvage the guns out of the boss about 35 years later.

They used a team with a diving bell to go down in the water and pull up 50 of the guns out of the wreck and salvage them.

So the most important part of the ship and the most expensive was actually recovered from the water.

What the fuck do you mean they salvaged the guns 35 years later?

Hey, Sven, I know it's 1663 and we don't know what causes literally anything to happen at all, but I'm going to need you to go get in this diving bell made of fucking leeches and humors or whatever and fetch me some cannons.

Do you know that Aristotle wrote about the diving bell?

Who cares?

Would you get in it?

Would you get the fucking Aristotle's diving bell?

Don't bring any meat, though it'll turn into flies you know what i'm gonna pass on this invention a dog i'm gonna let

history do its work

so so there it sat for mostly forgotten for over

so there it sat mostly forgotten for over three centuries now we already mentioned that the position of the ship helped preserve it but it was also in brackish water which also played a huge part in its preservation see brackish water is salt water but not to the level of sea water it had some freshwater mixed in.

Well, shipworms live in saltwater, and they don't live in brackish water.

So the shipworms that would have eaten the shit out of a 1628 vintage ship did not dine on it.

It was essentially preserved at the bottom of the harbor.

It was lost, though.

One amateur archaeologist by the name of Anders Franzen started looking into the histories of shipwrecks and thought he could find this one.

He searched the harbor for a few years using a coring probe from a boat, and he did eventually find it.

Okay, I don't even know what a coring probe is but that seems like overkill right because it's what it's 50 feet offshore in the bay and poking out of the water

poking out

i feel like you can find anything with a little thing that you scoop leaves out of in your pool

right just wiggle it down there a little bit the mess did fall off but anyway so when the swedish guy told us about the coring probe It was a sexual moment for him.

Yeah.

They really love this dude

who found it too.

They're like enamored with him.

They initially wanted to fill the boat with ping-pong balls or freeze it in a block of ice to raise it.

What a fucking stupid idea.

But they eventually dug around it and placed steel cables under it and used the buoyancy method I mentioned earlier to raise it.

It was first housed in a temporary structure and treated 24 hours a day for 17 years with polyethylene glycol.

It's a chemical used in skin cream.

This chemical replaces the water in waterlogged wood.

Then they started a process.

They started this process in 1962.

They stopped it in 1979.

And then they let it dry for nine years.

And then they built a museum in 1990.

And it has been a climate-controlled environment since then.

Yeah.

And if you can sneak in a quick face smush when the guards aren't looking, that ship takes 10 years off your life.

So good.

Eyebrows of an 11-year-old.

Cecil, what the fuck do you mean that they wanted to freeze it in a block of ice?

When I said

freeze, right?

We'll just build a big underwater frigidair around the ship, and everybody's laughing at me.

Everybody.

I just, before I say it, I want to remind everyone we have an idea jar.

And if you say anything mean,

like we all did about Greg's ping-pong idea.

So what's so amazing about this ship is that it's 90% original.

Take that, Theseus.

Poser.

Great joke.

That's a great joke.

Honestly, Cecil, when I got here, I was surprised that nobody had written it before me.

I was like, oh, wow, such a good joke.

The mess didn't survive and some of the railings didn't either, but mostly it's all there.

This kind of thing allows us to see how things actually worked.

I mean, we can read about something from the time describing its function, but we might not have all the knowledge to make a replica.

There's one example, and I'm going to veer off here for a minute.

We know that ships back then didn't use a ship wheel to steer until after the Vasa sank.

The Vasa used what's called a whipstaff.

It's a system that uses a giant lever.

It's attached to the rudder and it's more complex than I'm making it sound because it's inside the ship and they had like a whole room dedicated to it.

We always knew that's what they used.

And from

historians' descriptions of these ships, scholars all thought it was a pretty shitty system.

But when the Vasa was recovered with a fully functional whipstaff, it sort of changed presumptions of how effective this method was.

And a number of replicas of ships have been built with a whip staff, and the system has been found to be fully effective.

This is just one tiny thing that they learned from the VASA.

There's a bunch more, and I can't fit them all into a citation-needed essay.

If you ever have an opportunity to see this ship, it's fucking just unbelievable to see in person.

It's the best.

Just make sure you bring the right passport when you reach the content personally.

There's a story there.

So to wrap up, this ship may have never sailed into battle or even fired a cannonball.

It was only sailed for under a mile and it tipped over and it promptly sank.

But it's now one of the most visited ships in the world.

So don't give up.

You can make it big even if you're a huge failure.

Well, there you go.

And if you had to summarize what you learned in one sentence, what would it be?

Always go down on the first date.

Great advice.

And are you ready for the quiz?

All right, let's do it.

Okay, Cecil, which of the following was an additional thing that may or may not be true that was shouted at me from inches away by the random Swedish guy following us around?

A, they recovered a bunch of barrels from the ship, including beer and liquor casks.

B, the ship had big racks to hold those barrels that ran the width of the boat.

C, the racks weren't full for the big demo day.

So the moment the ship tilted a little bit, the barrels all rolled to that side.

It made it way up to our heads, Jesus Christ.

Or D, all the above.

I didn't hear that, but I want it to be true.

So I'm going to go with D, all of the above.

Nice to go.

Yeah, Cecil gets it.

All right, Cecil.

It is possible that the Vasa wasn't so much poorly designed as it was perhaps poorly piloted.

In fact, some say the pilot was known for being

A

tipsy.

That's from last week.

I'm going to go with A, Tipsy.

Yeah, tipsy.

All right, Cecil.

I made a joke about us all sharing our vacation as an essay topic last week.

Now you have.

So

I spent a lovely week in the Poconos with some parent friends.

B, place had a pool.

Really cool to hang in the pool.

Did you go in the pool?

Yeah, no.

There was a bar

place nearby.

Everybody said it's really good.

Could be an essay man.

Oh, okay.

D,

me?

I'm an essay.

I'm Eli.

I write about 15-year-old internet fights.

That's what I do.

What's your next essay, Eli?

You're going to write a fucking essay about how strong, bad, and homestar have a beef?

Is that the next one you're going to do?

People would love that.

People would love it.

It's so awkward for me now because the next thing it says in our notes is that I have to announce Eli is the winner.

Who won that fight?

Who won that fight?

There's just no way, like, coming out of that, that I can say those words.

But Eli gets to choose who does the essay next.

No matter what, I want Tom to write an essay

about men being cold in a sad place.

Tom, Cecil, Eli, and Heath, Noah, thank you for hanging out with us today.

We're going to be back next week, and by then, Tom will be an expert on something else.

Between now and then, you can listen to Cecil deal with shit he hates at the No Rogan podcast.

You can listen to Heath, Eli, and me deal with shit that we hate on god-awful movies, and you can listen to Tom deal with shit he hates on Dear Old Dad.

And if you'd like to help Tom

to customer service like four times in one, I was so mad over

the show going, you can make a per episode donation at patreon.com/slash citation pod or leave us a five-star review everywhere you can.

And if you want to get in touch with us, check out past episodes, connect with us on social media, or check the show notes, be sure to check out citationpod.com.

All right, everybody.

One, two,

three,

take flight.

It was

the dead guy.

Dead guy did it.

I'm going to torture him so bad.

Oh, poor, poor dead guy.

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